“I can promise you nothing. All rests with justice; we cannot possibly interfere in any way for or against that which has taken place.”
These were her actual words, and they must surely discredit the story that Prince Yousopoff and the Grand Duke Dmitry were victims of the vindictive spirit of the Empress.
Rasputin, as I knew him, was, I repeat, not the villain of the novel and the films. In my eyes he was an uneducated man with a mission; he spoke an almost incomprehensible Siberian dialect, he could hardly read, he wrote like a child of four, and his manners were unspeakable. But he possessed both hypnotic and spiritual forces, he believed in himself and he made others do so. I am not ignorant of what has been said concerning his abnormal animalism, his satyr-like sensualities, the nameless orgies in which young women and young girls gave themselves as willing victims to his lust. An English saying states that there is “no smoke without fire”—this may, perhaps, apply to Rasputin’s sensual side, but never to the alleged extent. One woman in twenty may lose her sense of fitness and seek to mate with a man in an inferior station of life, but it is not an everyday occurrence. The reports about his dress and his extravagance are also very much exaggerated. Rasputin lived, and died, a poor man. He usually wore the dress of a peasant, and his wonderful jewelled cross only exists in the brains of novelists and journalists. Rasputin at first wore a simple copper cross, later he wore one of gold which he afterwards sent to the Emperor at the Stavka. This gift in Russia is usually unwelcome, as it signifies that you present with it the sorrows and sufferings synonymous with the Cross. The Emperor thought that Rasputin’s cross was unlucky, so he gave it back to me, and asked me to give it to Anna. But Anna stubbornly refused to accept it, and I was at my wits’ end to know what to do. I could not tell the Emperor that Anna would have none of Rasputin’s cross—so I mislaid it, and I do not know what became of it. But I only saw the moral side of this apparently immoral man, and I was not alone in my conception of Rasputin’s character. I know for a fact that many women of my world who had “affairs” and many demi-mondaines were not dragged further into the mire by Rasputin, for—incredible as it may appear—his influence in such cases was often for the best.
I remember that I once met Rasputin when I was walking on the Morskaya with a brother-officer of Captain Dehn’s. He eyed me severely, and, when I returned home, I found a message telling me to come and see him. Partly out of curiosity I obeyed, and, when I saw Rasputin, he demanded an explanation.
“Of what?” I asked.
“Oh ... thou know’st well enough. Art thou going to follow the example of these frivolous Society women? Why art thou not walking with thy husband?”
He repeatedly said to women who sought his advice:
“If you mean to do wrong, first come and tell me.”
So I can do no more than speak of Rasputin as I found him. If I had been a Rasputinière, or the victim of an abnormal passion, I should not be living happily with my husband, and Captain Dehn would never have countenanced any association with Rasputin if the latter had been guilty of immoralities at Tsarkoe Selo. His duty as a husband would have been greater than his devotion to the Imperial Family.
I cannot entirely defend the Empress’s attitude. I love her, I reverence her memory, but I think she was, in many ways, perhaps, mistaken in her outlook. She argued, very rightly, that, even if she belonged to Russia, her soul belonged to God, and she had a perfect right to worship Him exactly in what manner most appealed to her. I have mentioned her views as to position being no ban where the instruments of God were concerned. In a worldly sense this was impossible, especially in Russia, where humility appealed neither to the peasant nor to the higher classes. The religious “communism” of the Empress outraged their sense of fitness ... the peasants could not understand one of their own class being on intimate terms with the Sovereigns ... the higher classes were bitterly contemptuous.