Rasputin by Brian Moynahan

Author:Brian Moynahan [Moynahan, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82646-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-12T04:00:00+00:00

At the beginning of April the imperial family left for a two-month visit to the Crimea. War tensions were growing; Nicholas was hundreds of miles away from his capital, with no reliable radio link, dependent on communications by post and courier. Spiridovich attributed this irresponsibility to Alexandra’s state of “extraordinary nervousness,” which could be relieved only amid the gardens and relaxed family life of the Livadia Palace.

Rasputin joined them, staying at the Hotel de Russie in Yalta. The visit turned into scandal. He bragged of his intimacy with the family to the hotel staff. Newspapers remarked that Vyrubova’s carriage was often seen outside the hotel. Tourist shops did a roaring trade in Rasputin postcards. Nicholas, irritated, suggested that the starets collect his daughters from St. Petersburg and spend the rest of the summer in Pokrovskoye. He agreed. After he left Yalta, Khioniya Guseva came looking for him. When the hotel told her he had already gone, she set out in search of him.

His daughter Maria was now fifteen. She played little games with men when she was bored. She telephoned numbers at random. If a man replied she chattered away to him, telling him that she adored him and arranging a rendezvous on the steps of the Hotel de l’Europe. She would giggle from across the street as the man paced up and down waiting for his mysterious admirer. At the end of May a man played a reverse trick on her. He rang her up, asking for her by name and telling her that he was hopelessly in love with her, and requested a meeting. She told him that she could not see him because she was leaving for Siberia with her father. The caller asked her carefully for the date of her departure.

Maria left St. Petersburg with her father on June 4 for the four-day journey by first-class sleeper and river steamer to the village. As the Trans-Siberian reached the Urals, a British Royal Navy battle squadron steamed past the imperial yacht Standart and moored in the Kronstadt naval base. The British had long viewed Russia as the land of whip and exile, but the threat of European war and fear of German strength had persuaded them to ally with Russia as well as France. The visit was a sparkling affair. Eight hundred guests were invited to a ball aboard the battle cruisers Lion and New Zealand, which steamed up the Neva to the Nicholas Bridge. The young grand duchesses, returned from the Crimea, stole the hearts of the crews as they clambered around the gun turrets. Alexandra met her nephew Prince George Battenberg, who was serving aboard the cruiser, but she did not allow the girls to stay on for the ball. It was a “white night,” when the summer sun scarcely slipped below the horizon and turned the smooth, gray waters of the Neva to gold. The linden trees were out, the fields filled with bluebells and cowslips. Guests were greeted by an arch on the gangway of HMS New Zealand with the word Welcome in huge letters; the mayor of St.

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