The last four chapters of Edvard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File, plus the Epilogue and Afterword — a police colonel taking orders from two men who were plotting against each other, a minister who showed a subordinate two packets of fifty thousand roubles, a basement remodelled into a dining room for one guest, a body with air in its lungs, and a coffin taken out of Petrograd disguised as a piano. Read from
RAW/books/The Rasputin File.md. One full archaeology pass per chapter, sweeping all seven dimensions in every run.Siblings: Part 1 — Radzinsky, Introduction and Chapters 1–4 · Part 2 — Radzinsky, Chapters 5–6 · Part 3 — Radzinsky, Chapters 7–11 · Part 5 — Moynahan, Preface and Chapters 1–7 · Part 6 — Moynahan, Chapters 8–15 · Part 7 — Moynahan, Chapters 16–22 · What Runs Through All of It.
Source ingest: Edvard Radzinsky, The Rasputin File
The peasant now had a bodyguard, and the bodyguard was a gendarme colonel reporting to the two men who had just been appointed to run the empire's police. That should have made him the best-informed man in Petrograd. It made him the transmission belt in a plot by each of his chiefs against the other.1
The arrangement was stated by the colonel himself. His detectives reported on Rasputin every evening, and he passed everything interesting to the minister in writing and to the police chief by word of mouth — visiting the second man at home, fairly often, as a friend. So the minister received only what the police chief wanted him to receive.
The security branch was folded in under him too, with one standing order. Its chief was to help in every way and never to record the visits Komissarov and his own agents made to Rasputin's flat. The surveillance summaries were to show a hole where the guard was.
He also gave Rasputin cash, always with the same noble purpose — so that he would stop taking money from petitioners. On holidays there were presents in the two chiefs' names: a case with a silver teapot, a gold watch with a chain, two bracelets. To the colonel's amazement, Rasputin carelessly gathered up those expensive things without even looking at what had been sent.
He answered occasionally with gifts of his own, and with the names he used for the minister to his face — the Tail, and Fat Belly — which produced impotent rage. He also went on taking money from petitioners exactly as before. The agents reported that on the stairway the petitioners talked openly about how much Rasputin would have to be given.
The colonel's two jobs then came apart, and the split is worth stating plainly. The police chief wanted him to make sure the peasant never went to Tsarskoe Selo drunk. The minister wanted him to make sure that he did, so that they would finally see him as he was.
Neither order was executable, and the reason is one of the sharper facts in the book. Rasputin's condition depended on nobody. However drunk he was, a telephone call saying Vyrubova would arrive in twenty minutes was enough, and he was sober.
The calls came from Tsarskoe Selo at ten in the morning, so he came back to wherever he was living to take them. The colonel arrived at the same hour — partly for the news, partly because that was the hour the peasant was still sober. And what he got was what Rasputin chose to give him.
Then the safe flat, which is the chapter's best picture of how a police state worked when it was not efficient.2 A furnished apartment on the first floor of a corner building. An agent and his family living in it. The day before a dinner, the agent ordered a luxurious meal for several people from a restaurant and then moved his family out for the evening. The food was fish, because of his diet. The wine and champagne were served in great quantities, to loosen his tongue.
At first he was formal with both officials and tried to keep the conversation in the register of his published meditations, drinking cautiously. The police chief recorded how that was fixed. The colonel poured him a glass and said: Grigory, drop the divinity. Better drink up and try talking a bit more simply. After that he used the familiar form of address, and invited them to the Gypsies. The other side of the chapter is what was happening in the flat on Gorokhovaya, recorded by the same agents, and it is the ugliest material in the book.
3 November 1915. An unknown woman came to petition about her husband, an ensign. Coming out, she told the porter what had happened. He barely listened to her request and started holding her face in his hands, and then her breasts, saying kiss me, I've fallen in love with you. He wrote out a note and did not give it to her, and told her to come back tomorrow. Then she added the sentence that names the system: to go to him, you have to make a down payment on what he wants.3
The police chief confirms it in his own testimony, about a woman trying to get her husband back from exile. She gave Rasputin all her money and he demanded more. She pleaded with him not to touch her. He gave her an ultimatum: either she did what he wanted and he would ask the sovereign about her husband, or she would never show herself again.
The women who refused him are named in the reports. The ones who paid are not. They appear as Madame K. or a certain lady. They were transitory, unwilling to talk, and the Commission in 1917 could not call a single one of them except the nurse from Part 2.
Their own words are the two that survive. He took advantage of my nervous state. And after reducing me to hysterics, he deprived me of my virginity.
The room itself is on record because two women described it. A narrow little study with a leather sofa, the leather rubbed completely bare, the back broken off and propped against it. One visitor sat down, he leaned against the back, and it fell off. She said it was no good and he ought to call a carpenter. He became flustered and muttered that it broke off from that itself.
Meanwhile the minister was planning theatre. The first show was a beating: money from Department of Police funds to arrange a merry party, a friendly reporter to hold Rasputin back until the other guests had gone, agents in disguise waiting in the street to take him away in a car and beat him so that he would remember his place — and then announce that it had been ordinary robbers.4 Then the second show, which was murder, and here the chapter's most instructive scene happens.
The police chief agreed and was lying. He explained why to the Commission afterwards, and the reasoning is entirely professional. He had no faith in it, being already convinced of Rasputin's cunning and intuition and of the minister's incompetence at organising secret police actions. And he asked himself what would come next. Given the sovereign's mystical temperament and the many holy fools before this one, the answer was a strange new person in the palace in the same line — and at least this one he knew how to work with.
What he did not tell the Commission was the plan. Let the minister organise the murder, prevent it, and hand him to the tsars — so that Tsarskoe Selo would understand it had no better candidate for the interior ministry than himself.
The colonel was let into it and played hesitant when the minister gave him the assignment. And the minister immediately promised him money, and then showed it to him: two packets of fifty thousand each, then raised to two hundred thousand. The colonel was amazed, because the minister could not plausibly have had it.
The plans came in and the police chief's task was to criticise each one and postpone it, or demolish it. Finally the minister proposed a case of poisoned Madeira sent as though from a banker. The police chief sent the colonel out for poisons. He came back with a set of little bottles and explained what each one did, and demonstrated on one of Rasputin's cats. The bottles were medicine and the contents were harmless.
The end was arranged in the classic style of the department. The exiled monk in Norway was threatening to publish the stolen letters, so the minister had to negotiate to buy them. The police chief recommended one of his own people for the errand.5 The man took the instructions and the documents, boarded the train, picked a loud row, threatened the officer who asked for his passport by shouting about his closeness to the minister, and was arrested. At his very first interrogation he testified that the minister had sent him to negotiate Rasputin's murder.
At the same time the police chief had his agents warn the monk that important people would soon propose the murder to him, and that a man was already on his way. The monk, working in a factory in Norway and desperate to come home, saw a chance to be reconciled with Rasputin — and sent warning telegrams to Vyrubova and to Rasputin himself.
Read: lines 7572–8205.
By late 1916 one belief had settled over the whole country, and the chapter's job is to say what it was made of.
Rasputin and treason were not even discussed. They were referred to as self-evident.6 A grand duke's diary carries the texture: Alix is remarkably unpopular. O God, save Russia! Anything but that shameful peace. And, from a nurse at the Winter Palace: they have a secret telephone line for conversations with Berlin.
A main task of the Extraordinary Commission in 1917 was to establish the empress's secret dealings with her German relatives. It established nothing of the sort, and what it found pointed the other way. When the German government approached the Entente with a peace offer at the end of 1916, Nicholas replied that the time had not arrived, since Russia had not yet taken Constantinople and the Straits or created a free Poland.
What Rasputin actually said is on record too, from the man who saw him most. If I had been there at the beginning of the war, there would have been no war. But since they have already started it, it has to be carried through to the end. And about her: she is terribly in favour of continuing the war — though there had been moments when she wept, thinking her brother wounded or killed. The master of the royal yacht says the same about both of them, and no document has been found saying otherwise.
One thing does not fit, and the chapter neither hides it nor resolves it. Ashes were found in her fireplace after the February Revolution, and a great many documents had been burned.7 The argument against the obvious reading is that the intimate letters — the jealous ones, the ones about Vyrubova — all survived. So what she burned was something dangerous rather than something private, and the likeliest candidates are her brother's letters, which the correspondence itself refers to from September 1915.
Meanwhile the machinery of government had become a chain of delegations, and the chapter names it in one paragraph. The tsar, at Headquarters, had ceded the disposition of power to the tsarina. She had entrusted it to the peasant. The peasant had entrusted it to crafty rascals. And the country's financiers bought the power from the rascals.8 All of them schemed against each other, drew each other into traps and slung mud, practising the art of mutual extermination to perfection — without noticing that it was rocking the boat they were all sitting in.
The code they used for it came out of the sect. Nicknames concealed real names among the Khlysty, and the tsarina, who liked secrets and was used to hiding her inner life from the court, made his nicknames part of the cipher in her letters.9 The railway minister was Steely. The prime minister was the Old Chap. The last interior minister was the Tail and Fat Belly. A friendly bishop was the Gopher. The tsar and tsarina were Papa and Mama. And the new interior minister was Kalinin, which was not his name at all — when this was pointed out, Rasputin said it did not matter, because everybody at the sovereign's laughed when he called him that.
How he treated the men he had installed is on record from his own secretary. During meetings he would shout at the empire's highest official: don't you dare go against Mama's wishes! Make sure I don't turn my back on you! Then you'll be done for! Then the speech that ended it. On 1 November the leader of the largest opposition party told the Duma that dark rumours of betrayal and treason had spread from border to border, had reached the highest circles, and had spared no one — the empress's name repeated ever more frequently along with those of the adventurers around her. Then the question the country repeated for four months: is it stupidity, or is it treason?10
The word treason fitted the mood of a badly wounded army. It was taken on faith at once and rooted in the consciousness of millions.
What the government did about it is a scene worth a chapter. The tsarina demanded action and the prime minister, too frightened to refuse, summoned the Speaker of the Duma. He had sprained his ankle. So a helpless old man lay in bed with his leg elevated, trying to reprimand an enormous, powerful man towering over him. The Speaker refused to send him a copy of the speech and told him Rasputin was a first-class scoundrel and that hanging would not be enough for him. And from the bed came the prime minister's answer, in six words that carry the whole of the last year: it is what is desired on high.
The man at the centre of it was living in fear. All anybody had to do was shout that an attempt was being readied, and he would put on his jacket and fur coat, pull his cap down and rush for the exit.11 His guard was now only the security branch detail, and he understood that they could hand him over at any moment. His publisher describes what the visits had become. He would try to get drunk as quickly as possible, demand Gypsies and entertainment, and the one thing he was keen on was dancing.
In October a friend found him melancholy with wine on the table, drinking as if to quiet a foreboding, repeating the times are changing, everything will be changed. On parting he was very affectionate, said he appreciated the man's warmth, remembered his late father kindly, and said he would perhaps be killed himself and they would not see each other again. Then, as if suddenly coming to, he said: no, no, we shall see each other.
The conspiracy meanwhile was being assembled in the family, and the chapter's reading of who started it goes against the surviving account.12 The prince who wrote the memoirs presents it as his own idea, with the grand duke agreeing to join. The likelier version is the reverse — that it began with the soldier rather than the civilian, and that the two decided together after the last failed warning to the tsar in November. Others knew. The prince himself wrote of a conspiracy, and the tsar later wrote to the grand dukes that the consciences of many were not clear, since Dmitry was not the only one involved.
The strangest corroboration is a departure. Ten days before the murder the tsarina's sister abruptly left Petrograd, and not for anywhere — she went to pray at the monastery holding the relics of the royal family's patron saint, for ten days. Both of the killers were her own protégés. One had lived with her family; the other she called my Felix and had helped to bring up.
The prince's letter to his wife in the Crimea says the rest. Instead of the usual words of love, he told her about the murder he was planning. I'm terribly busy working on a plan to eliminate Rasputin. That is simply essential now, since otherwise everything will be finished. And then: you too must take part in it. He closed by telling her to have his mother read the letter.
Access was bought with a body. He arrived at the flat complaining of chest pains, brought by the devotee who trusted him, and was treated.13 His own brief account to the investigator: Rasputin made some hypnotic passes over me and it did seem to me that there was a certain relief. His fuller Paris account has him lying on the leather sofa while Rasputin moved his hands over his chest, neck and head, then knelt with his hands on his head, mumbling a prayer, his face so close that the prince could see only his eyes. And the grand duke who knew him well could not make it fit. I cannot understand Rasputin's psyche. How is one to explain his boundless trust in the young Yusupov — the trust of someone who trusted no one at all, afraid he would be poisoned or killed?
His answer was that there had been a carnal element, and the chapter neither endorses it nor discards it. What it does note is what the word healing meant in this vocabulary: exorcising the demon of lechery — which, in this case, would mean the prince's desire for men.
However it worked, it worked. He came up the back stairs each time, avoiding the agents, and the explanation for that was ready-made — his family were enemies of the elder and he did not want a row at home. So the peasant was trained to expect him at the back door and to keep the visits from witnesses.
The rest was logistics. Cyanide obtained from an opposition politician who had made the great speech about Rasputinism, in crystals and in a small vial.14 A plan agreed in a railway carriage: gather at midnight, poison the pastries and the wine by half past twelve, then collect him by car — not to the front entrance but to a door off the yard, so the silhouettes would not show through the iron grating of the gate.
And a basement remodelled for the occasion into an old-Russian dining room. Chinese porcelain in wall niches. Carved chairs in leather from the storerooms. Ivory chalices. An inlaid ebony cabinet with concealed drawers. A sixteenth-century Italian crucifix of rock crystal chased with silver, standing on top of it. One conspirator who came to inspect the room approved of it on other grounds: the walls were thick and the two little windows were at pavement level, so it would even be possible to shoot.
Read: lines 8206–9150.
The day before he died went as usual. The devotee arrived before noon and stayed until ten. She testified that he was excited and said today I'm going, without saying where.15
Vyrubova came at eight and he told her he was going with the young prince to treat his wife. She did not know the wife was not in Petrograd. She advised him to refuse, on the grounds that it was degrading that they were ashamed to receive him openly in the daytime and chose night instead. He promised her he would not go.
The chapter's reading of this is the sharpest thing in it. Having promised to keep the trip secret, the peasant took no chances and told every close friend where he was going. He also believed the agents would follow him, and he was wrong, because the interior minister had lied to him about the guard. So he trusted the prince completely and took security measures anyway.
At ten a woman of about twenty-five arrived and stayed an hour — one of the transitory visitors to the little room with the sofa. His niece, who was staying in the flat, said plainly what she was for: she helped him remove the tension that took hold of him against his will. He was refining his nerves before a night that promised him so much.
His daughters came home at eleven. The elder testified that as she was going to bed he told her he was going to visit the Little One. And around midnight the interior minister called in.
The evening itself is documented from both directions, which is why it can be checked. The murderers wrote it up. So did a building custodian, a maid behind a kitchen curtain and a porter.
Wet snow was falling and the temperature was two or three degrees above freezing. A military car, rare then, arrived at the palace, waited, drove off, came back — because the courtyard gate was closed, the prince having forgotten the arrangement. After circling twice they gave up and went to the main entrance.16
Downstairs, the basement had become what one of them called an elegant confectioner's box in the style of the old Russian palaces. A fire in the fireplace. The ivory crucifix on the mantel. A table under the window with sherry, port, madeira and marsala. A polar bear skin on the floor in front of a settee. Then they sampled the pastries before poisoning them — little pink and brown petits fours, chosen to match the colour of the wall.
They drank tea and waited nervously for half past eleven, when the agents would leave the flat on Gorokhovaya and the outside surveillance would be lifted.
The custodian saw the car arrive after midnight at locked gates. A man got out and went straight to the door, and when asked where he was going said: to Rasputin's. He was beardless, with a black moustache, a long fur coat and a black fur cap. The custodian pointed him to the front door. He went to the back one instead.
He felt his way up an unlit stairway and had difficulty finding the door. The chain jangled, the bolt squeaked, and he stepped into the kitchen. He sensed someone watching him and instinctively pulled his cap down over his eyes — correctly, because the maid slept in the kitchen behind a curtain, and she parted it and saw that it was the Little One who had come.
The bedroom was lit only by an icon lamp. Rasputin lit a candle. The bed was rumpled; he had probably been resting. His fur coat and beaver cap were ready beside it. He was wearing a silk shirt embroidered with cornflowers, girded with a thick crimson cord ending in two large tassels, wide black velveteen trousers and high boots.
What the prince wrote about the next moment is either remorse or its performance, and he wrote it in Paris years afterwards. He was overwhelmed with infinite pity. He was ashamed of the dirty, monstrous lie he was using. He despised himself and asked how he could have conceived such a base crime. Rasputin noticed none of it, and the prince asks the question the whole book has been circling. What of his clairvoyance? What good was his gift of foresight if he did not see the trap that had been set for him?
Then they went out into the dark stairwell and Rasputin locked the door behind him. He took the prince's arm roughly and said better let me guide you, and led him down the dark stairs.
Read: lines 9151–9635.
The famous part of the story is the poison that did not work, and the chapter takes it apart with two arguments that both hold.
The first came from a grand duke who did not believe in devils and had used cyanide on insects. The solution was too weak. In their haste and anxiety they had made it up badly for the wine glasses. That is a plain explanation and it probably covers the wine.17 It does not cover the pastries, which had enough chipped into them to kill an ox. So the second argument is that he never ate them.
He kept a strict diet: no sweets, no meat, no pastries. His daughter says so. So does his secretary. So do the police chief and the interior minister in their testimony. His publisher explains that he tied the diet to his healing ability — fish, and no sweets — and says he did not break it even when drunk. A deputy chief of a judicial chamber who travelled with him described the boxes of candy in the compartment: he shared them and did not touch them.
So the pastries are a fabrication, added later as part of a story about a devil that ordinary men heroically destroyed. He drank a little of the wine and ate nothing. Which leaves the real question, and the chapter is honest that it cannot answer it. He was in that basement for more than two hours, and by one careful account nearly three — a nervous, impatient man, waiting for a woman who was not in the city, apparently having forgotten why he came.
Two explanations are offered and neither is asserted. The erotic one takes the grand duke's suspicion seriously: something happened between them, which is why Rasputin was content to wait indefinitely for the promised continuation, and why he did not notice a pistol in the hand of a man he had just been intimate with, and why his intuition was asleep. The realistic one is duller — that it all happened quickly and the long wait is an invention of the account.
What survives from either is one detail neither man would have invented. After being shot, coming to, Rasputin tore the epaulette off the prince's shoulder. And he kept saying one word: Felix, Felix. The chapter reads that as the reason for the disgraceful scene that followed, in which the prince flailed at a dying man with the handle of a dumbbell.
The body came up in a river on the morning of 19 December.18 The shirt frozen to it had been pulled up, exposing a bullet wound. There was another bullet mark on the forehead and a bruise on the face from a kick to the temple. A photograph survives of it lifted onto a sledge in the white expanse of the frozen river, and the raised icy hands could only be lowered after the corpse had thawed.
The autopsy was done that night in an almshouse that had once been a way palace of Catherine the Great. The heart was removed into a container. The lungs were lifted out and put into alcohol — and the reason they were interesting is that they settled the last question. There was air in them. He had gone into the water alive.
The report was kept by the Academy of Military Medicine. In the 1930s it disappeared. What remains are police photographs of the naked body and its wounds.
The funeral was small and it is the one part of the story where the myths can be checked against witnesses, because four of them testified. A grave already dug in the centre of the unfinished chapel, on the left side of the nave, with the coffin already in it. The confessor and a monk. No choristers — an assistant deacon sang. One official watched from behind the bushes and recorded everything, including that he approached the grave beforehand and saw a metal coffin.
There was no opening in the lid. Every eyewitness says so. The story that the tsarina had one cut so she could see his face when she visited the crypt appears in numerous memoirs, and there was no crypt either: the coffin was covered with earth immediately. The tsar's diary for 21 December records it in one sentence, and the word he chose for the killers is the whole of his position. We were present at a sad scene: the coffin with the body of the unforgettable Grigory, killed on the night of the 17th by monsters in the Yusupov house.
Then the punishment, which was not one.19 The grand duke asked to be tried by court-martial, because he understood that such a trial would make him a hero across Russia — and because it would let the story they had agreed on be told in public, with the blood on somebody else's hands. The tsar understood that too, and there was no trial.
The tsarina's sister wrote asking for a pardon for the prince, and her letter is the clearest statement of how the family had come to see it. She had learned he was killed by a man who would not go into the army because he did not want to shed anyone's blood, and she pictured what he must have gone through before deciding. The crime, she wrote, may be considered an act of patriotism. Nicholas did not answer her letter.
Read: lines 9636–9896.
The grave was opened because a captain had noticed a daily guard on a building site.20
The chapel was abandoned and boarded up, so he and his soldiers climbed the rafters and got in through an opening on the second floor. They lit torches and set to work with picks. They were there for the jewels the tsarina was said to have put in the coffin.
The zinc-lined coffin lay deep. They pulled the lid off in a hurry and saw a head and arms folded crosswise. There were no jewels. On top of the folded arms was a small wooden icon, with the names of the tsarina and her daughters written on the back in indelible ink, in their own hands, and a line added by Vyrubova: 11 December 1916. Novgorod. Anna.
The papers called it sacrilege — an icon in a coffin, and the coffin of a fornicator. And the File shows the tsarina had nothing to do with it. The icon had been given to Rasputin while he was alive, and the woman who washed and dressed his body put it in the coffin on her own initiative.
What followed reads like a rehearsal. The corpse was taken out of Tsarskoe Selo by railway freight car, packed in an enormous piano box and disguised as a musical instrument. In Petrograd it lay in the garage of the former court department among the royal carriages. On 11 March at dawn it was driven out along the old highway for a secret burial in an uninhabited place. Near Lesnoe the vehicle broke down — as the vehicle carrying the remains of the royal family would do eighteen months later. And it was decided to burn the corpse at once, right there, which is also what would be attempted at Ekaterinburg.
The pattern the chapter draws out of the rest is one that two policemen reached independently and both called superstitious.21 A man who reviewed the fates of everyone who had tied himself to Rasputin — the monk, the bishop, the official who made a brilliant career through him and then died of an incurable disease — arrived at the conviction that Rasputin's hand was a heavy one. The head of the Department of Police used almost the same words about the fatal disgrace that inevitably came to people who had sought support from him.
Both were thinking about careers. The chapter's point is that they should have been thinking about lives, because February was only the first step. After October, the men who had made the February Revolution were put into the same fortress cells as the tsarist ministers they had put there. One tsarist minister greeted one of the revolution's financiers happily: so, it is you! Really, you didn't have to give the February Revolution five million.
And on Gorokhovaya Street, where Rasputin had lived, the Bolsheviks opened the Cheka — the Extraordinary Commission that shared its name with the idealistic one of 1917 and shared nothing else. From that building many of his friends went to the wall.
The closing section says what the author thinks the man was, and it is the only place in the book where he says it straight.22 Deeply religious, and a great sinner. With the simplicity of a century of uneducated peasantry, he tried to combine the passions of the body with the teachings of Christ, and ended as a sectarian and a profligate while remaining deeply religious.
The poem quoted for it is Blok's, from 1914, and it is the argument in eight lines. To sin shamelessly, endlessly, to lose count of the nights and days, and with a head unruly from drunkenness to pass sideways into the temple of God. Three bows to the ground. Seven signs of the cross. A burning brow on a spat-on floor. A copper coin in the plate, and the hundred-year-old icon frame kissed three times or seven.
Happiness in the suffering of repentance, on a scale that matches the sin. And the claim the book ends on is a national one rather than a biographical one. He was the precursor of millions of peasants who, with religious consciousness in their souls, would nevertheless tear down churches — who dreamed of a reign of love and justice, and murdered and raped and flooded the country with blood, and destroyed themselves in the end.
Read: lines 9897–10116.
The last two pages are dated by an event: the coffins arriving from Ekaterinburg in 1998, to be buried in the city that had been renamed back to Saint Petersburg.23
And everything was as it had been in the peasant's day. The Romanov family divided. Discord among the people. And church hierarchs inexplicably opposed to the funeral.
At the airport a guard of honour stood in ranks and the wind tore at the standard. The surviving descendants formed up near the plane. The author was there as a member of the government commission, watching, as he puts it, the funeral of his own characters.
Everybody wanted miracles, and the miracles were meteorological. The people who flew in with the coffins reported that as they were carried out of the cathedral in Ekaterinburg the heavens opened with a sheet of water over the church. The people meeting them replied that in Petersburg, where it had rained the day before, the sun had shone brilliantly all morning.
Then the cortege moved, and the quarrels stopped. An unbroken line of people ran the whole way from the airport to the fortress, many kilometres of it. They stood in the open windows of the buildings. Some waited on their knees. And the President, who had refused to attend the day before, flew to Petersburg that morning to repent before the coffins for all the evil deeds of the departing century.
They were buried across the river from their own palace, among their ancestors. The author records what the country felt as a long-forgotten sense of joyful union and a moved, happy ease — as if a stone had fallen away, as if some terrible spirit had finally released the tsars and flown away from Russia for good. And then the book's last two sentences, which withdraw it. Or was it only for a moment? And an illusion, after all?
Read: lines 10117–10139.
Everything from here down is speculative by design. Above the line, every claim carries a footnote and a line range. Below it, the writing is allowed to weigh alternatives, run counterfactuals and hand the decision to advisors from other traditions — because that is the job of these sections.
[SPECULATIVE]Paradigm-obvious, and reading any of it as extraordinary is the modern reader's error. A police force running informants inside a protected man's household. This is what a political police did, and the surveillance had been in place since 1912 with the tsar's own consent. A minister and his deputy plotting against each other. Court and ministry factions had operated this way for generations, and the deputy's calculation — hand my chief to the sovereign and take his job — is a standard move, not a novelty.
Buying stolen letters back from a blackmailer abroad. The government had done this before and would do it again; the negotiation was routine and only the errand boy was a plant.
A grand duke expecting no punishment for a killing. Family members were tried by the sovereign's discretion, not by courts. The interesting thing is not that he escaped, but that he asked for a court-martial because he expected it to make him popular. A body burned by the roadside because the truck broke down. Improvisation of this kind was ordinary in March 1917, and the chapter's point is only that the same thing happened twice. Paradigm-breaking, and the cost is what marks it.
Showing a subordinate the money. The minister produced two packets of fifty thousand roubles and then doubled the offer, to a man he had known for weeks, for a murder. The cost was immediate: the colonel reported it to the man he actually worked for, and it became the evidence that destroyed him.
Telling everybody where you are going while promising to tell nobody. Rasputin's handling of his last evening is not the behaviour of a man walking into a trap blind — he told the devotee, told Vyrubova, told his daughter, and believed the guard would follow. The cost is that the one precaution he could not take himself had been removed by a minister he had installed.
Buying access with your own body. The prince submitted to being treated, alone, on the sofa, by the man he intended to kill, to earn the trust that would get him into a car at midnight. Whatever happened in that room, the cost was that he could never afterwards give a straight account of the murder, which is why the story he told has a devil in it.
Putting an icon signed by the empress and her daughters into the coffin. The woman who did it acted alone, and every newspaper attributed it to the tsarina. The cost fell entirely on someone who had not done it, at the moment she could least afford another charge. The tsar's word monsters. Writing it in his own diary about a grand duke and a prince of the empire, on the day of the funeral, is a break with everything a sovereign's diary was for.
[SPECULATIVE]The road not taken is the investigation that was run and came back empty, and then made no difference at all.
The Extraordinary Commission of 1917 set out to prove the empress had been in secret contact with her German relatives about a separate peace. It had the letters, the ministers, the household staff and the police files. It found nothing. And the evidence it did find ran the other way — the tsar's own answer to the German peace approach of late 1916, which was that the time had not come because Russia had not yet taken the Straits. Suppose that finding had been published in February 1917 rather than gathered afterwards. The counterfactual is tempting and it does not survive contact with the material.
The belief was not built out of evidence, so evidence could not take it down. It was built out of a German name, a chain of defeats that needed a cause, a man in the palace who had opposed the war, and a Duma speech that supplied the word. A nurse in the Winter Palace was already telling people there was a telephone line to Berlin. Nobody had seen it, and nobody would have gone to look.
The one document that would have mattered is the one that was burned. Ashes in a fireplace are the only piece of the case that cannot be cleared, and the chapter's own best reading is that what she destroyed was her brother's letters — which would show her receiving peace approaches from the German side and declining them. Innocent, and unpublishable in 1917, because the fact of the correspondence was the accusation.
So the road not taken is narrower than it looks. It is not could the treason charge have been disproved. It could, and was. It is whether a disproof arriving in the middle of a losing war would have changed one mind, and the answer the chapter's material gives is no — because the same population had been told the truth about the peasant for eight years by prime ministers, bishops and newspapers, and had believed whichever version fitted their existing view.
[SPECULATIVE]Take Rasputin at eight o'clock on the evening of 16 December, with Vyrubova in front of him telling him not to go.
An advisor working from deniable power would go straight at the arrangement rather than at the risk. Every protection he had was held by somebody else. The guard belonged to a minister he had installed. The surveillance belonged to a department he had helped staff. The route into his own flat had a back door that a young man had been trained to use so that nobody would see him arrive. A man whose whole position rests on being indispensable to other people has no independent security at all, and the counsel is that the moment to notice this is not the night it is withdrawn. He had spent a year making men powerful on condition that they were useful to Mama, and had never once made one useful to himself.
An advisor working from scapegoating under stress would tell him the country had already selected him and that this was the fact governing the evening. A Duma speech six weeks earlier had put the empress's name beside the adventurers around her and asked whether it was stupidity or treason, and the word had rooted in millions. A losing army needed a cause. He was the only available one who was not a general, not a minister and not the crown — and a designated cause does not get to negotiate the timing of its own removal. The counsel is not caution about one invitation. It is that in the winter of 1916 there was no version of this evening he could have declined enough times.
They disagree about what he should have done. The first says he should have built his own protection. The second says by December there was nothing left to build.
What both agree on is the finding, and it is in his own behaviour rather than in either reading. He told four people where he was going while promising to tell nobody. That is not carelessness and it is not clairvoyance failing. It is a man who knew he was in danger, taking the only precaution available to a person with no independent means — leaving a trail of witnesses. It worked exactly as designed: the maid, the porter, the custodian, the devotee, the daughter and Vyrubova between them reconstructed the night within days. He could not save himself. He could make sure the story could not be hidden, and he did.
A third voice, from the dichotomy of control, is about Vyrubova rather than about him, and it is the shortest. She gave him the right advice for the wrong reason — that going at night was degrading, since they were ashamed to receive him by day. She was reading a question of status where the question was survival. And she was satisfied by a promise, which is the cheapest thing a frightened man can give. What was in her power was to send somebody with him, and she did not think of it, because she was arguing about honour.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: relying on a document that only one institution holds.
The autopsy on Rasputin's body settled the last factual question about his death. The lungs went into alcohol, they contained air, and he had been thrown into the water alive. The report was retained by the Academy of Military Medicine, and in the 1930s it disappeared. What survives is police photographs of the naked body, and a policeman's second-hand recollection of what a minister told him the autopsy showed. So the strongest single conclusion in the whole story now rests on hearsay and a set of pictures.
The pattern is not confined to that one file, and this part of the book is where it becomes visible. The prosecution documents on Rasputin were destroyed by officials who had themselves been among his visitors. The testimony of the prostitutes was lost, leaving exactly one deposition. The last photograph of him alive is described in detail by two witnesses and cannot be found. Each loss is separately explicable, and each removes the item that would have decided a question.
Scope conditions. This bites where a finding is embodied in a single physical document; where that document is held by one institution rather than distributed; and where a later regime has an interest in the subject. All three held — the third decisively, since a report proving the elder was murdered by aristocrats was of no use to anybody after 1930.
The general form. A conclusion is only as durable as the number of independent places its evidence sits. Not the quality of the evidence, not who signed it, not whether it was believed at the time — the count of copies in unrelated hands. Modern equivalent: any finding that exists as one file in one archive, where the custodian outlives the interest that produced it.
The second-order finding is what fills the gap, and it is the reason this book had to be written. Where the document went, the legend grew — the devil who survived cyanide, the crypt with a window in the coffin, the enormous body. Each of those is an answer to a question a missing document used to close. The chapter can refute the pastries because a diet is attested by six witnesses, and it cannot refute anything the autopsy would have covered.
[SPECULATIVE]Decision type: reading a pattern off a list of people's fates.
Two men reached the same conclusion independently and both hedged it as superstition. One reviewed the people who had linked their destinies to Rasputin — a monk ruined, a bishop broken, an official who rose brilliantly and then died of an incurable disease — and concluded that the hand was a heavy one. The head of the Department of Police used almost identical words about the fatal disgrace that came to everyone who sought support from him.
The chapter accepts the observation and rejects the frame, and the correction is the transferable part. They were counting careers inside a system that was about to kill everyone in it. After October the men who made the February Revolution went into the same fortress cells as the ministers they had put there. The Cheka opened in his old street and sent his friends to the wall from it. The base rate for a well-connected Russian in 1917 to 1921 was catastrophe, whether or not he had ever met a peasant from Tobolsk.
Scope conditions. The error appears wherever a striking outcome is observed in a selected group; where no comparison group is looked at; and where a causal story is available that feels explanatory. All three held. The group was self-selected by proximity to power, nobody counted the fates of equally placed men who had avoided him, and a heavy hand is a satisfying story.
The general form. A list of bad outcomes among people connected to one person is evidence of nothing until you know what happened to the people who were not connected to him. The observation may still be true; it is simply not yet a finding. Modern equivalent: any claim that association with a person, product or place is unlucky, made from a roster of the associated and no roster of anyone else.
What makes this one worth keeping rather than dismissing is that the men making the error were professionals at assessing evidence, and one of them ran the Department of Police. They were not credulous. They were inside the selected group, which is the condition under which the error is invisible, because every case you can think of is a case that reached you through the same filter.
Read from RAW/books/The Rasputin File.md, lines 7572–10139: ch. 12 (7572–8205), ch. 13 (8206–9150), ch. 14 (9151–9635), ch. 15 (9636–9896), Epilogue (9897–10116), Afterword (10117–10139).
The strongest documentation in this part. Komissarov's testimony on the double reporting line, the safe flat and the gifts — a witness with no reason to invent the humiliating parts. Beletsky's testimony, which is self-serving on the murder plot and precise on everything else, and which is corroborated by Komissarov on the money and the poison bottles. The surveillance reports quoted with dates, including the petitioner's statement to the porter on 3 November 1915. Yusupov's letter to his wife, which puts the plan in writing before the event. The tsar's diary entry of 21 December. The four eyewitness statements on the burial, which agree with each other and against every memoir. The tsarina's letters, which date the dropping of the case against Rasputin's secretary to the week before the murder. And the physical evidence: the police photographs of the body, and the recorded fact that there was air in the lungs.
Where the evidence is a witness with a motive, and the text says so. Yusupov's memoirs are treated throughout as an account constructed to make the killing heroic — the chapter says outright that the pastries were added later as part of a fable about destroying a devil, and demonstrates it from six independent statements about his diet. Purishkevich's account is the same document in a different voice. Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich's diary is used as the sharpest reading available and is also the source of the erotic hypothesis, which the chapter carries without endorsing. [CONTESTED] And Vyrubova's testimony is again performance, though here it is corroborated on the burial by three other witnesses.
Where the reasoning is the author's rather than the record's, and it is heavy in these chapters. That the conspiracy began with the grand duke rather than the prince. That the tsarina burned her brother's letters. That the long wait in the basement is explained by an encounter between the two men. [PLAUSIBLE — needs corroboration] That the healing sessions were an exorcism of the demon of lechery in the sect's own sense. And the closing claim of the Epilogue — that Rasputin was the precursor of the peasants who would tear down churches — which is a thesis about a nation drawn from one biography, offered without qualification. [n=1 OBSERVED]
A note on the source's own position. These chapters are where the book's method is at its most powerful and its most exposed, and the two are separated by about forty lines. The demolition of the pastries story is exemplary: a claim from a hostile memoir, checked against six independent statements, and dropped. The reconstruction of the three hours is the same instinct with no documents under it, and the reader is given no marker that the operation has changed. The Afterword is a different register again — the author placing himself in the story as a member of a government commission, watching the funeral of his own characters — and it closes by withdrawing its own consolation in two sentences. Bounded absence. No claim is made about material outside lines 7572–10139.