Read The Rasputin File for Free Online Page B

book has often been considered a mere Pasquil undeserving of serious attention. But in the File the Extraordinary Commission puts questions about the book to the people mentioned in it. It turns out that Iliodor was in the main telling the truth. And that he really did have the letters of the empress and her daughters and was quoting accurately from them. And that he also had the diary of Olga Lokhtina. This is confirmed by Lokhtina herself in the File. After acquainting themselves with Iliodor’s book, both Lokhtina and Bishop Feofan had only a few private observations to make. So Iliodor should not be discounted as a source.
    A House Recovered From Oblivion
    After I had already started writing this book, I received the last batch of unpublished documents about Rasputin in the Siberian archives. Among them was an inventory of property belonging to Rasputin made immediately after his murder. Included was a detailed description of the legendary house in Pokrovskoe. I now knew every chair in his house and every glass on his table: the petit-bourgeois ‘city décor’ of the upstairs rooms where his Petersburg devotees stayed, and the age-old clumsy peasant style that prevailed below.
    Now I had seen what he saw. And I had heard his way of speaking, too, which had been left behind in his writings. Now Rasputin was alive . I could begin. Would my portrait be a new one? I did not know. But I knew it would be fair. And the warranty of that would be the participation of those who cared about him.
    This book is a completion of the investigation of that mysterious person begun by the Provisional Government in 1917. A unique investigation ofRasputin in which the only testimony permitted is that of people who actually knew him.
    But most important is that here will be heard the voices of those whose unpublished testimony is contained in the File.
    Once, as I was finishing the book about the last tsar, I impulsively wrote, ‘This is a book I shall never finish’. And once more that whole crowd of former acquaintances has rushed back into my life. And once again I have begun to see that same night in my dreams. That finale in a dirty basement of the history of a three-hundred-year-old empire. And the tsar falls onto his back, and two of the girls crouch by the wall covering themselves with their hands to ward off the bullets, and Commander Yurovsky runs into the gunsmoke to finish off the little boy crawling across the floor. Only now in that smoke I see a bearded man. He who did so much to bring that basement scene. And who knew that it would come.

2
    THE MYSTERIOUS WANDERER
    The Period Of Legend
    The greater half of his life is obscure. In 1917, the investigators of the Extraordinary Commission talked with Grigory Rasputin’s fellow villagers in an unsuccessful attempt to establish his early biography. They merely created an ideological version of the tale of the peasant given to drunkenness and thievery from early youth. Nor are the memoirs of his daughter Matryona much help. Written after she had emigrated, they are the fruit of her own imagination and that of the woman journalist who helped her with them.
    But in the Commission archive there is an account of that period by Rasputin himself. In 1907 after he had established himself in the royal family, he would often tell stories about his wanderings in Russia; a transcription under the title ‘The Life of an Experienced Wanderer’ was kept by the tsarina. But we shall keep in mind: he said what his royal admirers wanted to hear was a kind of ‘Life of Saint Grigory’. A legend, that is. We can, however, still find traces in it of what is for us the most interesting thing: Rasputin’s transformation. The few documents about his past recently discovered in the Siberian archives will serve as a supplement.
    The Missing Birth Date
    Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was born in the Tyumen district of the province of Tobol in the village of Pokrovskoe, a small settlement situated deep