Rasputin by Frances Welch

me.’
    It turned out that Rasputin had earlier spotted Stolypin in the street, and said: ‘Death is stalking him.’ But this was seen less as a prophecy than a reaction to Stolypin’s sickly appearance. After her initial shock at the assassination, the Tsarina observed coldly: ‘Those who have offended our Friend may no longer count on divine protection.’ Striking the final blow, Rasputin produced a book describing the celebrations of 1911, during which Stolypin had been murdered. He called it ‘Great Festivities in Kiev!’
    So after Hermogen contacted him, Rasputin may even have been looking forward to a get-together with the clerics. He readily agreed to be collected by Iliodor, on December 16; coincidentally the same date as his fateful midnight assignation with Yussoupov fiveyears later. He was clearly unaware, at that point, that Iliodor already loathed him.
    He swept buoyantly out of his flat in a 2,000-rouble fur coat. But when he arrived at the monastery, he was immediately brought down to size by the dwarf ‘Blessed Mitya’ in ascetic’s rags. Mitya pronounced – presumably through his interpreter – that Rasputin should be killed or castrated, adding: ‘You have offended many nurses. You are sleeping with the Tsarina. You are an anti-Christ.’ He then set about punching Rasputin, before grabbing his penis and trying to pull it off.
    Rasputin tried to push Mitya away: he finally succeeded, sending the ‘little prophet’ flying across the room. But before he could straighten up, the stately Hermogen had begun beating him on the back with a heavy cross, accusing him of suffering from a sickness he called satyriasis.
    Hermogen dragged Rasputin to the chapel and made him swear never to see the Tsar and Tsarina again, adding: ‘Don’t return to Russia for three years.’ The fiery Iliodor, wielding an axe, now weighed in, agreeing with Mitya that Rasputin should be castrated. Iliodor wanted Rasputin sent to the prison island Sakhalin; the lavish house in Pokrovskoye must be burnt to the ground. Rasputin eventually managed to wrest himself free and shot out of the room, before locking the angry clerics in by propping a chair up under the doorknob.
    As soon as he had recovered himself, Rasputin fired off complaints to both the Tsarina and the Synod. Retribution was swift: Hermogen was ordered into exile to the Jirovitsky Monastery in Vladimir Oblast, deniedhis rights to a hearing. When he wrote requesting an audience in order to divulge certain secrets, the Tsar replied that he didn’t want to know them. Instead, he was bundled unceremoniously into a car and driven to the station. Iliodor was eventually chased to ground, arrested and sent to the Florishchev Monastery, where he set about plotting to kill Rasputin; such was his zeal that, at one point, he accrued 120 bombs.
    Iliodor now denounced the Imperial couple, dismissing the Tsar, at five feet four inches, as ‘a little man’. He himself was proud to resemble a Volga brigand, with hands the size of large stones. He added that the Tsar, a keen tippler and smoker, was a ‘drunk weed puffer’. In fact, there were claims that Rasputin had cured the Tsar of his drinking habit, with an elaborate procedure involving complex switches of wines and glasses. He had also cured his friend Simanovich, who swore to the cure’s efficacy: ‘I never drank again for as long as I lived.’ But Iliodor knew nothing of any cures. He carried on raging against the Imperial Family, finally insisting that the Tsarina was ‘debauched’ and that Alexis was fathered by Rasputin.
    When the Synod failed to take action against Rasputin, Iliodor dismissed it as a ‘House of Pigs’ and signed a renunciation of faith in his own blood. Asked subsequently to give his religion at hotel reception desks, he declared himself Iliodorian.

    T hrough the early months of 1912, opposition