ANNA VIRUBOVA SPEAKS
“Let any American mother imagine that her only son, who came into the world a weakling, and whose life had always hung on a thread, had been miraculously restored to health. Suppose also that the person who did this wonderful thing was not a doctor, but a monk of that mother’s church. Wouldn’t it be natural for that mother to regard the man with almost superstitious gratitude for the rest of her life? Wouldn’t it also be natural that she would want to keep the monk near her, at least until the child grew up, in order to have the benefit of his advice and help in case of a return of the illness?”
I had heard the story of the Rasputin murder as told by one of the principals in the gory tragedy, Prince Felix Yussupoff, and now I was to hear it again, this time from one of the reputed “dark forces,” of which Rasputin had been the head and front, Anna Virubova, the intimate friend and confidante of the Empress of Russia, and believed by many to be the chief accomplice of Rasputin. I had heard all sorts of horrible stories about this woman. It was said that she was Rasputin’s procuress. It was said that she conspired with him to make the Empress believe that the Czarevitch would die if the monk were sent away from court, or if he voluntarily withdrew. On the several occasions when he did go, Madame Virubova was said to have fed the child with minute doses of poison, so that he sickened, and when that happened of course the frantic mother demanded the return of Rasputin.
As the monk’s appetite for power grew and he demanded the removal of this or that metropolitan or bishop, the removal or appointment of ministers, the suppression of newspapers that denounced him, the Czarina, urged on by her friend Madame Virubova, would insist that Rasputin should have his way. Otherwise he might leave, and the Czarevitch would surely die. Madame Virubova was also said to have conspired with a court physician to poison the Czar, or rather to put constant doses of some toxic in his food in order to cloud his mind, and thus make him an easier dupe for the pro-German conspirators. They told the most amazing stories about this woman, making her out a sort of a combination of Lucrezia Borgia and Jezebel.
Gregory Rasputin and some of his female devotees.
Whether the provisional government believed these stories or not, the Duma members who forced the revolution evidently believed Anna Virubova to be one of the most dangerous of the inner court circle, or camarilla, which was planning a German peace. For when the Czar was forced to abdicate, and all the accused men of the camarilla were arrested and thrown into the fortress of Peter and Paul, Madame Virubova was also arrested and sent to the fortress. She was taken out of a sick bed—there had been an epidemic of measles in the royal family—thrown into an underground cell and kept there for three months. At the end of that time she was in such a state of collapse that the prison physician recommended her removal to a hospital. To this the provisional government consented, but when the order for her release was presented to the governor of the fortress, and he ordered her cell door unlocked, the soldiers on duty refused to obey the order. It was days before they were persuaded to let her go. Madame Virubova was sent to a hospital for a month, and then they set her free. That is, they permitted her to go to the home of her brother-in-law, who is a stepson of the Grand Duke Paul, and to live there under strict surveillance. They had searched her house in Tsarskoe Selo, and her rooms in the palace. They had put her through every kind of cross examination, not once but many times, and they were forced to admit that they could not discover a single incriminating circumstance, or any evidence of poisoning or conspiracy. They had to release her, but she was not allowed to leave the country, or even her brother’s house, without permission, which, of course, would not be granted. She was watched all the time, and might be rearrested and given the third degree at any time if the least bit of evidence seemed to warrant it.
Anna Virubova is considered a very dangerous woman. She is one of two things, very dangerous or very much maligned. She gave me the impression, after two long, intimate talks, of a woman absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. If she is a criminal she ought to be put in prison for life, for her powers of deceit are simply marvelous. I liked Anna Virubova, and I don’t think I could possibly like a woman capable of poisoning little boys or handing innocent young girls over into the claws of a lascivious monk.
How I met this woman, how she came to talk confidentially with me, where I saw her and when, are not to be written just now. They could not be published without injuring a number of people, perhaps including Madame Virubova herself. I saw and talked with her soon after her release from the prison hospital. She was still a little drawn and haggard from the hardships and the terror of her experiences in Peter and Paul, and she was in the depth of despondency over the plight of her friend the Czarina. She is a very pretty woman, this alleged Borgia-Jezebel. She has an abundance of brown hair and her eyes are large and deeply blue. Her features are regular, and her mouth curves like a child’s. Two or three years ago the train on which she was traveling between Petrograd and Tsarskoe Selo was wrecked, some say purposely. Madame Virubova was desperately injured, both legs being broken and her spine wrenched. She was lamed for life and walks with a crutch, but in spite of that all her movements are singularly graceful. One of the stories about her is that she was a peasant girl brought to court by Rasputin and forced on the Empress as a convenient tool of the conspirators. This is quite untrue. Madame Virubova is a patrician by birth, and before she was born, and long before Rasputin appeared in Tsarskoe Selo, her family was attached to the court. The father and the grandfather of Madame Virubova were court officials, confidential secretaries to the emperors of their times. Both her parents are living and I have met them both. They are highly educated and unmistakably well bred. They are not rich people, but they live in a very beautiful apartment in an exclusive quarter of Petrograd.
For more than a dozen years Mme. Virubova lived on terms of closest friendship with the Czarina. She did not live at court, at least she did not until after the murder of Rasputin, when she went to the palace to be near the frightened and despairing Empress. She had a house of her own in Tsarskoe Selo, and it was at her house that the Empress met the monk who was to have such a sinister influence on her after life. The Empress, who was never popular at court, and never happy there, liked to have a place where she could go and throw off her imperial character, be a woman among her intimate friends, care free. Such a refuge was Mme. Virubova’s home to the melancholy Alexandra, wife of the Emperor of all the Russias. Mme. Virubova’s husband was an officer in the navy, and gossip had it that he disapproved of his wife’s friendship with the Empress, and disapproved still more of the people who were invited to meet her in his home. Rasputin was not the only one of the mystics and charlatans she met and talked with, it appears. The Empress was deeply religious, and she was interested in all kinds of strange and mystical doctrines. The husband of Mme. Virubova was not, and he feared, as well he might, that almost any kind of a political plot might be hatched by that “little group of serious thinkers” who met in his drawing room and in the scented boudoir of his wife. They quarreled. It got to the point where they did nothing but quarrel, and one day Mme. Virubova was given a choice between her husband and her friend. She chose the friend, and thenceforth she occupied the house in Tsarskoe Selo alone. The husband went to sea, and after a year or two he died.
Something of this Madame Virubova told me, and the rest a friend of the husband told me. In her story the husband appears as a jealous, unreasonable, bad tempered man, almost a lunatic. In her friend’s story he appears a martyr. “I have not had a very amusing life,” said Anna Virubova, in speaking of her marriage. She smiled, a little bitterly. “Perhaps that is one reason why I, like the Empress, was attracted to religion, why we both liked and trusted Rasputin. We did trust him, and to the end everything he did justified our confidence. As for the Empress’s feeling for him I give you my solemn word of honor it was solely that of a grateful mother, and a devout member of the Orthodox church.” And then she spoke the words with which I have opened this chapter. “Let any American mother imagine that she had an only son who had come into the world a weakling, one whose life had always hung on a thread, and that that child had suddenly and miraculously been restored to health. Let her suppose that the person who did this wonderful thing was not a doctor but a monk of her own church. Wouldn’t it be natural for that mother to regard the man with almost superstitious gratitude for the rest of her life? Wouldn’t it also be natural that she should want to keep the monk near her, at least until the child grew up, in order to have the benefit of his advice and help in case of return of the illness? Well, that is the whole truth about the Empress and Rasputin.”
“But did Rasputin really heal the Czarevitch, and restore him to health?” I asked.
“Judge for yourself,” she replied. “Perhaps you know how ardently the birth of a son was desired by both the Emperor and the Empress. They had four girls, but a woman may not inherit the Russian throne. A boy was wanted, and when at last he came, a poor little sickly baby, the Empress was nearly in despair. The child had a rare disease, one which the doctors have never been able to cure. The blood vessels were affected, so that the patient bled at the slightest touch. Even a small wound would endanger his life. He might bleed to death of a cut finger. In addition to this the boy developed tuberculosis of the hip. It seemed impossible that he could ever live to grow up. He was a dear child, always, beautiful, clever, and lovable. Even had less hung on his life than succession to the throne it would have been hard to give him up. Each one of his successive illnesses racked the Empress with such terror and anguish that her mind almost gave away. For a long time she was so melancholy that she had to live in seclusion under the care of nurses. It was not so much assassins that she feared. It was that the child should die of the maladies that afflicted him. And, in addition to all this daily and hourly anxiety and pain she suffered, the poor Empress was torn this way and that by the grand dukes and all the members of the court circle. Each one had a remedy or a treatment they wanted applied to the child. There were always new doctors, new treatments, new operations in the air. The Empress was criticized bitterly because she wouldn’t try them all. The Empress Dowager—well——” Virubova looked at me and we both smiled. The mother-in-law joke is as sadly amusing in a palace as in a Harlem flat.
“Then came Rasputin,” continued Madame Virubova. “And he said to the Empress: ‘Don’t worry about the child. He is going to live, and he is going to get well. He doesn’t need medicine, he needs as much of a healthy, outdoor life as his condition can stand. He needs to play with a dog and a pony. He needs a sled. Don’t let the doctors give him any except the mildest medicines. Don’t on any account allow them to operate. The boy will soon show improvement, and then he will get well.’”
“Did Rasputin say that he was going to heal him?” I asked.
“Rasputin simply said that the boy was going to get well, and he told us almost the day and the hour when the boy would begin to get well. ‘When the child is twelve years old,’ Rasputin told us, ‘he will begin to improve. He will improve steadily after that, and by the time he is a man he will be in ordinary health like other men.’ And very shortly after he turned twelve years old he did begin to improve. He improved rapidly, just as Rasputin said he would, and within a few months he could walk. Before that, when he went out it was in the arms of a soldier, who loved him better than his own life, and would have gladly given his life if that could have brought health to his prince. The man’s joy when the child really began to walk, began to play with his dog and his pony, was equaled only by that of the empress. For the first time in her life in Russia she was happy. Do you blame her, do you blame me for being grateful to Rasputin? Whether he cured him or God cured him, I know no more than you do. But Rasputin told us what was going to happen, and when it was going to happen. Make of it what you will.”
Rasputin told the Empress of Russia that her son would begin to improve when he was twelve years old. Almost any doctor might have told her that it was not unlikely that he would begin to improve as soon as adolescence began. Many childish weaknesses, and even some very grave constitutional weaknesses, have been known to disappear gradually from that period. Empresses and ladies in waiting are not usually medical experts, but they might have learned that much from ordinary reading, if the doctors failed to enlighten them. But neither Alexandra nor Virubova knew it, and when Rasputin threw that gigantic bluff at them they grabbed it. As a guesser Rasputin was a wonder, for the almost impossible happened and the sick little Czarevitch lived up to his prediction. That’s what I make of it.
When the Czarevitch grows to manhood, if he ever does, and reads the history of his father’s and mother’s last years as rulers of Russia, what a subject for reflection this whole Rasputin episode will afford him! He was the pawn shoved back and forth across the chessboard where the destinies of nearly two hundred million Russians, to say nothing of the Romanoff family, were being decided. He was the bait with which the biggest game in modern European politics was played. He and a wily monk and two women with a taste for mystical religion.
“This was the beginning of the close friendship between Rasputin and the royal family,” Madame Virubova continued. “But it was by no means the only tie between them. Whatever anybody says about Rasputin, whatever there may have been that was irregular in his private life, whatever he may have done in the way of political plotting, this much I shall always believe about him, he was clairvoyant, he had second sight, and he used it, at least sometimes, for good and holy purposes. His prediction about the health of the Czarevitch was only one instance. Often and often he told us that such and such thing would happen, and it always did. The Emperor and Empress consulted him at several crises in their lives, and he always told them what they ought to do. In each and every case the advice was wise. It was miraculously wise. No one except a person gifted with second sight could possibly have known how to give it.”
“Was Rasputin as bad as they say he was?” I asked.
“He couldn’t have been,” she answered. “But he may have been more or less licentious. Unfortunately you find men, even in holy orders, who are weak in certain ways. I can only answer positively for myself and the Empress. The charge that either of us ever had any personal relation with Rasputin was a foul slander. Nothing of the kind ever existed, or ever could have existed. Oh,” she cried, a sudden flame dyeing her white cheeks, “how easy, very easy, it is to say that kind of thing about a woman. Nobody ever asks for proofs. Accusation and judgment are joined instantly together. Why, Rasputin was just a wandering monk when we met him. He was dirty, uneducated, uncouth. He did learn to wear a clean shirt and to preserve a sort of cultivated manner when he came to court. That was not very often, by the way. I am sure that the Empress did not see him more than six or eight times a year, and the Emperor saw him more rarely than that.”
“Was he a German agent? Was he a part of the political intrigue that threatened a separate peace for Russia?”
Anna Virubova was silent for a long minute. She seemed to be pondering. Then she spoke, and her eyes were the candid eyes of a child. “Truly, I do not know. Certainly I did not believe it in Rasputin’s lifetime, but now—I do not know. This much I do know, that it was difficult, very difficult, at the Russian court, to avoid being drawn into political intrigues. You know, of course, what a court is like.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know anything about a court. Tell me what it is like.”
“There is only one word in English to describe it,” replied Mme. Virubova. “That word is ‘rotten.’ A court is made up of numberless little cliques, each one with its endless gossip, its whisperings, its secrets and its plots, big and small. There is nothing too big or too small for these cliques to concern themselves with. They plot international political changes, and they plot private murders. They plot to ruin the mind and the morals of an Emperor, and they plot to break up a friendship between two women. They plot to raise this one to power and they plot to bring about the fall of another. They plot in peace and they plot in war. The person who lives at court and is not drawn into some of these plots is an exception to the rule. That is all that I can say. However, Rasputin, as I told you before, never lived at court. He did not even live in Petrograd. Most of his time was spent in Siberia, and he ought to have been in Siberia on the day he was murdered. But he had a home in Petrograd, where his wife and two daughters lived while the girls were being educated. Rasputin was very fond of those girls, and he was visiting them when that Yussupoff boy killed him.” Mme. Virubova usually spoke of Prince Felix Yussupoff as “that Yussupoff boy.”
