Alexander II_ The Last Great Tsar - Edvard Radzinsky [106]
“Helpless”? “Pleading”? While “helpless Anya” had managed to set up a correspondence from the fortress with the most dangerous woman in Russia, the empress?
Blok recorded her interrogation as well.
“Chairman: ‘And did you know that Rasputin was a degenerate and nasty man?’
“Vyrubova: ‘That is what everyone said. I personally never saw anything. Perhaps he was afraid in my presence. He knew that I was close to the court. Thousands of people came with many many petitions about him, but I never saw anything.’
“ ‘And you yourself never were involved in politics?’
“ ‘Why would I be involved in politics?’
“ ‘Do you mean you never tried to place ministers?’
“ ‘No.’
“ ‘But you brought the empress together with ministers?’
“ ‘I give you my word of honor. There was never anything of the kind.’
“ ‘You can give no better than your word of honor.’”
Thus Anya mocked them.
But what did the Special Commission finally say about the tsar’s case?
Romanov (another bearer of that name), a member of the commission’s presidium, wrote: “The only thing the sovereign can be accused of was his inability to take men’s measure.… It is always easier to mislead a pure man than a bad one capable of deception. The sovereign was indisputably a pure man.”
In the interests of the family, however, the commission did not publish these thoughts—about the pure man—so as not to fan already inflamed passions and avoid a collision between the government and the Soviet. A month later Nicholas was simply allowed to be together with his family again, and Kerensky declared: “Thank God, the sovereign is innocent.”
No one made any effort to let society hear that, though. The Romanovs were much too unpopular!
That is why the famous actress Vera Leonidovna Yureneva was so surprised when, that same year, they decided to do Konstantin Konstantinovich’s play King of the Jews at the Nezlobin Theater and she was offered the role of the Christian Anna. The play had been performed once at the Hermitage Theater. Nezlobin, an entrepreneur, had bought the whole luxurious set for peanuts. Three young men came to each performance, K. R.’s sons: Ioann, Konstantin, and Igor. The extras in the performance were people with magnificent posture, “formers”: officers who had fled Tsarskoe Selo. Now they exchanged their brilliant uniforms for the costumes of theatrical slaves of the first century of our era.
At this time something terrible happened to Alix at Tsarskoe Selo: there was a rumor that soldiers searching for jewels had found Rasputin’s grave under the chapel. The garrison ordered Rasputin’s corpse removed from Tsarskoe Selo. Poor Alix did the impossible: the head of the guard, Colonel Kobylinsky, got in touch with the Provisional Government and asked them to prohibit the grave being dug up.
She was on the brink of hysteria, and Kerensky, who sympathized with them more and more (a common feeling of revolutionary rulers toward genuine tsars) sent a tank to guard the ill-fated grave—but it arrived too late.
The coffin with Rasputin’s body was already on the truck. The lid was lying on the ground by the wheels, and the holy man’s awful made-up face and disheveled beard were looking up at the sky.
A meeting was being held beside the coffin, and a soldier was speaking. To the delight of those gathered, he showed them a small wooden icon that had been removed from the coffin. Inscribed on the back were the initials of the tsar’s entire family.
Later the truck with the coffin set out from Tsarskoe Selo. At a deserted spot on the Vyborg road where the luxurious mansion of Rasputin’s friend, the Tibetan doctor Badmaev, had once stood (an angry mob had burned the mansion down), the truck came to a halt. An enormous fire was laid, into which they threw the zinc coffin and Grishka’s gasoline-doused body.