Rasputin by Douglas Smith

Author:Douglas Smith
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-12-02T05:00:00+00:00

45. The Tovarpar

After days of intense fighting, on 4 August the fortress of Kaunas in Lithuania, vital for Russia’s western defenses, fell to the Germans. The Russians suffered approximately 20,000 casualties and the loss of considerable weaponry. The Russian commander, General Vladimir Grigoriev, was relieved of his duties, put on trial, and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. That evening Rasputin visited a downcast Nicholas and Alexandra at the palace. They talked, and Rasputin blessed the tsar with an icon. The next day he wrote Nicholas to lift his spirits: “Peace and grace, God is with us—be firm.”1 Later that day Rasputin and his son Dmitry departed Petrograd for home. Rasputin later informed Vyrubova that the governor of Petrograd had telegraphed Dzhunkovsky and the head of the police department to stop him from leaving, but for whatever reason no one held them up at the station. “God is always kind,” he noted.2

The police in Tyumen were on hand to record their arrival: train no. 4 from Petrograd carrying Rasputin, Dmitry, and Okhrana agents Terekhov and Svistunov arrived at the station on 9 August at 5 a.m. Rasputin and Dmitry got a cab and went to visit Rasputin’s old friend Dmitry Stryapchev at his home. Meanwhile, Terekhov and Svistunov went to the wharf to wait for their steamer to Pokrovskoe. Stryapchev and Rasputin—without Dmitry, who stayed behind in Tyumen—arrived at the wharf around 8 a.m. and Stryapchev bought Rasputin a ticket for a single-person cabin in first class on the steamer Tovarpar. At 11 a.m. the steamer departed Tyumen for Tobolsk, with a scheduled stop at Pokrovskoe. Before the boat pulled away, the police reported that “Neither at the station, nor on the wharf, did Rasputin say anything warranting attention.”3 That evening Rasputin arrived home. At 10:00 the next morning, according to police reports, Rasputin exited his house and came out into the yard, the entire time sighing and moaning and expressing amazement at how he had managed to drink three bottles of wine and gotten so terribly drunk the day before. “Oh, boys,” he said to Terekhov and Svistunov, “that didn’t go well.”4

Others were also talking about how Rasputin’s trip had not gone well. On 13 August, Governor of Tobolsk Stankevich ordered his chief of police Khrushchev to take a deposition from one of the passengers to follow up on talk that had reached him of trouble on the Tovarpar. His name was Wilhelm Harteveld, a fifty-six-year-old Swedish composer and pianist who had been living in Russia since 1882. He and his wife had been traveling that day on the Tovarpar when they first caught sight of Rasputin drinking tea in the first-class saloon. He was dressed in a shirt of pink brocade, military-style trousers, silk stockings and slippers. His overall appearance was rather disheveled: his shirt was dirty and his underpants stuck out from his trousers. Rasputin seemed rather nervous, on edge, but still he was behaving himself appropriately.

Rasputin approached Harteveld, his wife, and their acquaintance and offered them

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