Read The Rasputin File for Free Online

George V, that double of Nicholas II, Prince Michael also closely resembles the last Russian tsar. Both in his features and, more importantly, in his eyes: light-coloured eyes with the same tenderly sad expression described in so many memoirs of Nicholas. Following that meeting with the relative with the face of the last tsar, I went to videotape the palace where the man who had undone the tsar had himself been murdered.
    Everything had been preserved: I walked down the same staircase from which Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and the other plotters had nervously listened to what was going on in the basement.
    I went into the yard by the same door through which the bloodied Rasputin had fled, while trying to save himself. And then I returned to the basement which had been transformed by Felix into an elegant room. Here they had sat just before the murder. Standing there now are two silly wax figures depicting Felix and Rasputin. The door to the basement was shut and I remained alone. I had a strange feeling that I had seen that basement before: the small space, the windows raised just slightly above the ground through which only the legs of passers-by could be seen, the massive walls that blocked out all sound. It was a double of the Ipatiev House basement, where the royal family had been executed.
    The night afterwards I returned to Moscow. The next day was the premiere of Khovanschina at the Bolshoi Theatre. I had been invited by my friend Slava Rostropovich who was conducting the opera. I looked at the stage and the costumes from the times of the kingdom of Muscovy, the same costumes in which Nicholas and Alexandra had been so fond of dressing up for their ‘historical’ balls. It all seemed like a continuation of the day before.
    As indeed it was.
    After the opera I went to congratulate Rostropovich. And then in the dressing room crammed with people he said to me, ‘What a present I’ve prepared for you! You’ll go crazy! You’ll simply die! You must come to see me in Paris immediately! I’m holding it there!’ He paused, but I already knew what was next. And he said, ‘I bought some documents for you at a Sotheby’s auction. It’s a complete file, an enormous one. And do you know what it’s about?’ I knew. And he then finished, ‘It’s about Rasputin. It’sthe interrogations of the numerous people he knew by the Provisional Government Commission.’
    The longest day of my life had ended.
    At Rostropovich’s apartment in Paris, in his living room draped with Winter Palace curtains emblazoned with the tsarist coat of arms, and containing an easel with a portrait of Nicholas with those same inexpressibly sad lapis eyes by the great portrait painter Valentin Serov, he pulled out an enormous volume. The testimony of Rasputin’s publisher Filippov, of Sazonov, and of Maria Golovina. And so on. It was the File, the source of the testimony Simpson had quoted.
    The File, the one I had been looking for so long!
    A Very Brief Description Of The File
    The standard cover bore the inscription, ‘The Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons’. Contained within were nearly five hundred pages of documents on the special forms of the Commission with the Commission’s stamp. All the interrogation transcripts were signed by the people who had been interrogated. Here were the signatures of Vyrubova, the gendarme (political police) chief Vladimir Dzhunkovsky, Colonel Komissarov, the doctor of Tibetan medicine Badmaev, the minister of internal affairs Khvostov, the head of the Moscow secret police Martynov, and so on. As though the detention cells of the Peter and Paul Fortress of March 1917 had come back to life. And the signatures of the famous interrogators of the Thirteenth Section who had conducted the interrogations: T. and V. Rudnev and G. Girchich.
    What reading it was. The File contained the sensational testimony of Bishop Feofan, the famous