Rasputin by Frances Welch

barefoot, screaming ‘Blessed Mitya’, Rasputin would have seemed eminently presentable.
    But his most important new connection was the Tsarina’s friend, Anna Vyrubova. She first encountered the Man of God on a train, when, true to form, he had asked her about her ‘unhappy’ life. The train carriage did not lend itself to any exchange of confidences; Anna was prevented from filling in the sorry details until the pair had been formally introduced at Militza’s palace. But then she poured out her worries about her impending marriage, due to take place in 15 days’ time. She had misgivings about her groom, who would, indeed, turn out to be a deranged alcoholic sadist. At this late stage,Anna was still wondering whether to go ahead with the wedding. Rasputin’s predictions were unhelpful: ‘He [Rasputin] told me I should marry but the union will be unhappy.’
    It was later rumoured that Anna’s husband was maddened after finding her in bed with the Tsarina: the two women were believed to enjoy an ‘unnatural friendship’. Anna was certainly devoted, convinced that the Tsarina had once cured her with the touch of a hand. But the Tsarina, for her part, does not seem to have been so enamoured, once describing her friend as encumbered with ‘stomach and legs colossal’. She added that Anna had an unappealing habit of speaking ‘as if she had a mouthful of porridge’. In fact, contrary to any rumours, Anna remained bemused about sex, flatly refusing conjugal relations with her new husband and lamenting to the young Maria Rasputin: ‘I hear of those who enjoy it so much. I wish I could.’
    Over the next ten years, Anna’s passion would be directed towards Rasputin. Gleb Botkin, the son of the Tsar’s doctor, believed her the victim of ‘sexual hysteria and religious mania…’ and that she was ‘head over heels in love with Rasputin’. She was thrilled by his divergent personalities – the ‘peasant with an unkempt beard’; the ‘Saint who uttered Heaven-inspired words’. When he held her hand she is said to have moaned and trembled.
    It is not known what Rasputin thought of her in these early days. She was young, in her early twenties, but the Tsarina was not the only one to note her less attractive features. Yussoupov said she had a ‘puffyshiny face and no charm whatsoever’. The French Ambassador, Maurice Paleologue, dismissed her as: ‘rather stout… with an ample build… a fat neck and full fleshy lips’. Either way, Rasputin made full use of the fox fur which she gave him to put on his bed in St Petersburg. At one point, he suggested provocatively that she watch while he was soaped by his wife in the bath-house at Pokrovskoye.
    In any case, by the time of the Revolution, there were so many rumours linking Anna Vyrubova to Rasputin that she finally decided to have herself officially examined by doctors. The result, which she promptly made public, was perhaps unsurprising: she was still a virgin.

    W hat was Rasputin’s appeal for the Imperial couple? Both loved the idea of the adoring peasant. The Tsar had a distaste for sophistication, making the same grimace when saying ‘intelligentsia’ as when he said ‘syphilis’. Reverence for the peasant was rife within the Russian aristocracy of the time. Many had taken up Count Tolstoy’s view that the peasants were ‘closer to God… They lead moral working lives and their simple wisdom is in many ways superior to all the artifices of our culture and philosophy.’
    The Tsarina liked to attend public churches with the ever-obliging Anna Vyrubova in order to be with ‘plain people’. ‘The peasants love us,’ she insisted.
    Amid the fripperies of life at Court, there was always a call for an uncorrupted straight-talker, a character like Queen Victoria’s John Brown. Indeed, one of the