October. China Miéville
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formulation. He cannot, he says, ‘agree with your opinion … that Russia’s defeat would be a “lesser evil”’. He considers this a ‘connivance’ with patriotism, supporting the ‘enemy’.
One reason his call provokes such consternation is that Lenin is often not clear about whether it is for the defeat of one’s state at the hands of another power, or, along with all imperialist powers, at the hands of the workers. Although the second possibility – international insurrection – is clearly his preference, as well as the telos of his argument, at times he seems to insinuate that the first would suffice. There is an element of performance in the ambiguity. By hammering home this ‘defeatism’, his intention is to bolster the growing sense that the Bolsheviks, more than any other current, oppose the war utterly and without remission.
The war mobilisation drains Russia’s land and industry of workers. Ammunition, equipment, food run short. Inflation soars, with a brutal impact on workers and the urban middle class. The public mood begins to turn. As soon as the summer of 1915, strikes and food riots shake Kostroma, Ivanovo-Vosnessensk, Moscow. The liberal opposition organises into a soi-disant ‘Progressive Bloc’, calling for rights for minorities, an amnesty for political prisoners, certain trade union rights, and so forth. The bloc is furious at incompetence from above, and absolutely opposed to power from below.
The strike wave ebbs, flows and continues, and with it extremes of social desperation. Amid the chaos of the flights of internal refugees, of invaded towns and captured and killed soldiers, thousands of besprizorniki – abandoned, lost or orphaned children – make their way to the cities and gang together in makeshift new families, living in the cracks, by theft, begging, prostitution, whatever they can. Their numbers will explode in later years. An underground of profiteering stirs, of despair, decadence, drunkenness, bohemian ‘cocainomania’. Febrile symptoms of collapse. Moscow is in thrall to a new tango craze, and it undergoes dark mutations: mimes of murder, jaunty references to carnage. One professional dance duo are notorious for their ‘Tango of Death’, performed in traditional evening wear, the man’s face and head painted to become a skull.
A decade before the war, as the tsar and tsarina sought help for their desperately unwell son, they had made the acquaintance of an unkempt, ill-educated, egocentric Siberian ragamuffin, a self-styled holy man who seemed able, by whatever combination of charm, folk knowledge and luck, to alleviate young Alexis’s suffering. Thus Rasputin, the so-called mad monk who is neither mad nor a monk, established himself at the heart of the court – where he remains.
He is a man of rude but substantial charisma. Possibly a member of the Khlysty, one of Russia’s many outlawed sects, he certainly emanates a vatic intensity reminiscent of its practices. He represents himself both as the voice of old, simple, royalist Russia, and as a seer, a prophet, a healer. Nicholas tolerates him; Alexandra adores him.
Rumours swirl about Rasputin’s excesses. He is certainly a drunkard and braggart, and whether or not the many stories of his sexual conquests are true, he enjoys astonishing licence among the nobility, treating his wealthy patrons, especially women, with eroticised discourtesy. He relishes power, and during the war, his power grows. With Alexandra’s support, Rasputin influences governmental patronage according to his whims.
In court circles, even those previously tolerant grow resentful of this upstart muzhik. Hawkers of smut do brisk business in pornographic caricatures of the extravagantly bearded ersatz starets (holy man), up to no good with the tsarina. The tsar brooks no criticism of ‘our friend’, as the tsarina calls Rasputin. She relays his advice to her husband, encouraging him to make military decisions based on Rasputin’s ‘visions’. She gives him Rasputin’s comb to brush through his hair before meeting ministers, so that Rasputin’s wisdom may guide him. He obeys. She sends him crumbs from Rasputin’s bread. He eats them.
Nicholas is already taxing the patience of modernisers by turning his back on the liberals’ milquetoast reform programme. Now, in August 1915, he insists on taking overall command of the army. Though the real decisions are made by the capable General Michael Alexeev, the tsar’s absence leaves considerable power in the hands of the loathed tsarina – which also means those of Rasputin.
With Nicholas’s complicity, Alexandra begins what the ultra-right-wing deputy Vladimir Purishkevich calls ‘ministerial leapfrog’. The Romanovian method becomes one of appointing adventurer after incompetent after nonentity to grand offices of state. The liberals and the sharper-witted right grow ever more apoplectic.
As hatred for Rasputin grows in high society, respect for Nicholas plummets.
It is in this context that Milyukov makes a historic Duma intervention in the Tauride Palace. Breaching all rules of etiquette and discretion, he denigrates, by name, both the tsarina and Boris Stürmer, her latest appointee as prime minister, in a litany of governmental failure. Milyukov punctuates his speech with the repeated question: ‘Is this stupidity or is it treason?’
His words reverberate throughout Russia. He has said nothing that is not known, but he has said it.
It is news to no one by now that ‘the present order of things will have to disappear’. In January 1917, General Alexander Krymov, on leave from the front, meets with Duma deputies in the home of the colourful conservative politician Michael Rodzianko – an Octobrist, a committed monarchist but the implacable enemy of Rasputin – to discuss their discontent. The army, he tells them, would accept, even welcome, a regime change, the replacement of the tsar.
Nicholas receives word after desperate word that he must alter course to survive. The British ambassador transgresses protocol to warn him he is on the brink of ‘revolution and disaster’.
Nothing seems to stir behind those placid tsarry eyes.
By December 1916, a month before the dawn of the revolutionary year, various disgusted aristocratic conspiracies for national renewal are underway: on the 16th, one of them reaches fruition. With collaborators from the highest tiers of the court, including that redoubtable racist Purishkevich, one Prince Felix Yusupov entices Rasputin to visit his palace by the river, ostensibly to meet his wife. While ‘Yankee Doodle’ plays repeatedly on a gramophone, Rasputin lounges in his smartest clothes in a dim, arched room, eating the cyanide-laced chocolates and drinking the poisoned Madeira his host has provided.
The toxins have no discernible effect. The conspirators consult in frantic whispers. Yusupov is panicking. He comes back in to join his guest, and, as if seeking the most preposterous imaginable circumstance for murder, he invites Rasputin to examine an antique Italian crucifix, crafted in rock crystal and silver, that he has propped up on a commode. As Rasputin bends reverentially to look, crossing himself, Yusupov draws a pistol and shoots.
A legendarily protracted death scene plays out. Rasputin lurches upright, reaching out to grab at the terrified assassin. Yusupov scrambles away, yelling for his accomplice Purishkevich. When the two men return Rasputin has vanished. Mindless with agitation, they rush outside, and find him lurching through the thick snow in the Petersburg night, croaking Yusupov’s name.
‘I will tell the Empress!’ Rasputin gasps, staggering towards the street. Purishkevich seizes Yusupov’s weapon and fires several times. The towering figure sways and falls. Purishkevich runs through the snowdrifts to the prone and twitching man and kicks him in the head. Now Yusupov joins in, beating madly at the body with a truncheon, the snow muffling the thuds. Yusupov screams his own name, in echo of his victim’s dying fury.
Hearts hammering, they wrap Rasputin’s body in chains and drive him through the darkness to the Malaya Moika canal. They shuffle with their burden to the edge, and let the black water take him down.
But they miss one of his boots, and leave it on the bridge, where the police will find it. When, three days later, the authorities pull Rasputin’s contorted body out of the water, word spreads that the underside of the newly formed ice is scratched where, with the frenzied strength of the godly, Rasputin struggled to emerge.
People flock to the spot where the so-called