On 19 July (1 August New Style), Germany declared war on Russia. Rasputin telegraphed Vyrubova a message for Nicholas and Alexandra: 'My dear darling ones! Don't despair!'42 The following day he sent a cable directly to Nicholas:
'My dear and darling, we treated them with love while they were preparing their swords and misdeeds for us for years, I am convinced: everyone who has experienced such evil and cunningness will get a hundredfold punishment; God's mercy is powerful, we will remain under its cover.'43
On 24 July, Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia. Rasputin wired a message of hope to Alexandra: 'God will never take His hand from your head, He will give you consolation and strength.'44
As insistent as Rasputin had been for peace, now that war had begun he committed himself to victory and never again did he question the righteousness of Russia's cause nor waver in the need to fight until she was victorious over her enemies.45 He wired to Vyrubova on 26 July:
Everyone, from the east to the west, has come together with the same spirit for the Motherland, this is a great joy.46
Rasputin again wrote of his confidence of Russia's victory in war to Nicholas in the middle of August:
God is wise and shows us glory through the cross, you will win with this cross. The time will come. God is with us, the enemies will tremble with fear.47
A week later Rasputin was released from the hospital and left straightaway for the capital. On 22 August he was received by Nicholas.48 With his return came the usual salon gossip. The French ambassador Maurice Paleologue recorded that Rasputin had told the empress how his miraculous survival was further proof of God's care for him. And there was a good deal of speculation on what stance Rasputin had taken with regard to the war. Paleologue, for one, thought that Rasputin had been urging Nicholas to seek an alliance with Germany, although, like a good many members of the upper classes at the time who couldn't imagine a peasant having his own ideas, the ambassador was certain that Rasputin had not come to this notion on his own, but was simply repeating the phrases fed to him by Prince Meshchersky.49
As for the press, the St Petersburg Courier now reported that Rasputin not only endorsed the war, but was planning on enlisting himself and heading to the front. Such was the word at the salon of Countess Sophia Ignatieva, and when Rasputin's female followers heard of this they raised a cry of worry, insisting he not place himself in any danger.50 The story in the Courier so upset one government official, a certain I. A. Karev serving in Dagestan, that he felt he had to write to Rasputin himself:
I learned from the newspapers the other day that you are planning on leaving for the field of battle, and as every Russian must sacrifice himself for the defence of the Fatherland, so is your intention of the greatest merit, but please stop and think - this terrible war and its horrors have already devoured a great many lives and you too shall not escape this fate, yet by remaining where you are, so shall you still bring a great benefit to humanity. If your wish to leave for the war is steadfast and you nonetheless want to go there, then go with God, many will be praying to God for you [...].51
Needless to say, Rasputin never did go off to war, nor did he ever have any intention to.
Rasputin never wavered after this point in his support of Russia's war effort. His notes and telegrams to Nicholas and Alexandra for the next two years convey one and the same message: that if the tsar remains firm and resolute, God will bless Russia with victory.52
It is one of the strange ironies of Rasputin's life that regardless of his actual commitment to the war, in the eyes of a great many Russians he came to be seen as an agent of the Germans secretly working to secure a separate (and, to most, traitorous) peace. There never was, nor is there now, any evidence of this outlandish claim, but to contemporaries the existence of 'Dark Forces' led by Rasputin and the empress Alexandra selling out the country to the Huns was taken as indisputable fact.53 Russians would have been amazed to have known that by the final months of Romanov rule Rasputin was in fact trying to save the dynasty. One of his chief preoccupations by the autumn of 1916 was the food crisis in Russia's major cities, the danger of which - for the regime - he intuitively sensed, and he repeatedly urged the tsar to act on the matter, even offering specific steps to alleviate the problem.54 But by then Rasputin's days, and those of the dynasty, were numbered. Early in the hours of 17 December (30 December New Style) Rasputin was murdered in cold blood in the Petrograd mansion of Prince Felix Yusupov. His killers insisted they had acted solely out of patriotism, as if the assassination of a Siberian peasant might save the regime. Alexandra would go to pieces at his death, Yusupov believed, and would be shut up in either a convent or asylum, while the tsar, finally liberated from the influence of the 'Dark Forces', would lead Russia to victory on the battlefield and stem the tide of chaos sweeping the country.55 The reasoning is stunning for its naivete.
Although news of the murder was initially met with euphoria, soon notes of concern could be heard.
Pavel Zavarzin, the former head of the Moscow Security Bureau (aka Okhrana), recalled travelling in a train across central Russia soon after the murder. He was reading about the details in the newspaper along with his fellow passengers in the restaurant car when one man, a middle-aged Siberian merchant, broke the silence: 'Thank God that they've killed that bastard.' With that, everyone began to speak at once. A dog's death for a dog,' he heard some state. But others saw something wrong in the affair. One man was heard to say that a true nobleman doesn't invite a man into his home to kill him, and another that the murder by men so close to the throne amounted to a knife in the back of the Russian sovereign. 'It's a sign of chaos and the inevitable revolution,' said a bearded Siberian man in glasses, and with that sharply stood and left the car.56
The fact that Rasputin's murderers were aristocrats was not lost on the common folk. A society lady in Petrograd overheard wounded soldiers in a military hospital complaining, 'Yep, only one peasant managed to make his way to the Tsar, and so the nobles killed him.' It was a fairly common opinion among the masses and helped fuel the hatred of Russia's upper classes that was soon to erupt with white-hot fury.57 A peasant from Pokrovskoe told Sergei Markov while travelling through Rasputin's village in early 1918 that the 'Burschujs' had killed Rasputin since he had defended the interests of the poor folk before the tsar.58
Not only had Yusupov and his fellow conspirators failed to save the monarchy, they had helped to hasten its demise. As Alexander Blok famously, and correctly, noted, the bullet that felled Rasputin 'struck the very heart of the ruling dynasty'.59
THE LAST TSAR
March 1917 donald Crawford
else for that matter, who could have credibly foreseen that within the year the Russian state would have disintegrated - the Romanov dynasty swept aside and its successor, the forerunner of what had appeared its future as the new socialist republic, brought down in the disorder. There was nothing in this to justify any claim to 'historical inevitability', but everything to remind the world that cometh chaos, there is only hindsight to explain the outcome.
True, the enforced abdication of Emperor Nicholas II could be seen as inevitable, given that he had by then alienated almost the entire political establishment as well as a large part ofthe wider Romanov family. In the midst of a disastrous war with Japan he had survived the revolution of 1905 by reluctantly yielding to demands for an elected parliament, the Duma, albeit with ministers answerable to him. In the midst of a war with Germany he stubbornly ignored demands for a government appointed by and responsible to that same Duma. Autocracy not constitutional monarchy was to remain the model for imperial Russia.