The Rasputin File Read Online Free PDF Page A

the end of March Vyrubova was arrested and brought before the Extraordinary Commission.
    In her testimony published in the Proceedings , Vyrubova had said in reply to the investigator’s question as to ‘why she had burned a whole series of documents’, ‘I burned almost nothing. I burned only a few of the empress’s last letters, since I didn’t want them to fall into the wrong hands.’ And I believed her. Perhaps she had in fact hidden the most important documents. After all, had she not kept the tsarina’s letters written during the royal family’s later incarceration in Tobolsk, despite all of Alix’s calls to burn them? And if she had in fact hidden those letters, then was it not also possible that she had taken them with her on the night she fled Red Russia to Finland across the treacherous ice of the Gulf?
    One of the few people close to the royal family to escape unharmed, Vyrubova died peacefully in Finland in 1964. In the Helsinki National Archives I was shown Vyrubova’s police dossier which included the interrogation conducted by the Finnish authorities after she had turned up in a refugee internment camp in the city of Terioki. The Finns fully understood the significance of her testimony. As was stated in the file, ‘this internment-campdeposition is to be conveyed to the prime minister and president.’
    But Vyrubova had had nothing new to say. Her answers were a scrupulous reiteration of her testimony before the Provisional Government’s Extraordinary Commission. In 1923, Vyrubova wrote and published her memoirs. She wanted to use her maiden name of Taneeva to conceal her identity, but her publishers preferred Vyrubova. I found no drafts of the memoirs in her archive.
    In Finland she became a nun, although in secret; that is, she was able to live at home rather than in the convent (she was lame in one leg and they took her invalid status into account). I got in touch with the convent where she had secretly taken the veil, but there was nothing there. Vyrubova had lived by herself, seeing almost no one. It even occurred to me that she might have taken a vow of silence of some kind. But it turned out otherwise. Badly in need of money in 1937, she signed a contract with a Finnish publisher for a new edition of the memoirs. But as she was writing, the Second World War began. The First World War had destroyed her empire and her life, and now the Second World War dashed her hopes of obtaining a little money. Memoirs about the Russian tsar and tsarina fighting Germany were not what was called for in a Finland that had become a German ally. Then after the war, when the Soviet NKVD started to make inroads in Finland and émigrés were almost openly deported to the USSR, the tsarina’s friend was very probably afraid to remind people of her existence. Only in 1953, the year Stalin died, did she turn the completed book over to the Finnish publisher. But they failed to publish it; apparently they took the view that the manuscript did not add anything to the earlier editions. Then at the beginning of the 1980s, while going through the Finnish publisher’s papers after his death, his daughter came upon an envelope containing photographs. On it was written: ‘Photos of Anya Vyrubova with her autographs on the reverse’. And she also found the manuscript of Vyrubova’s memoirs. The book was published in 1984. The edition passed unnoticed, since there had been nothing new in it.
    Reading those memoirs prepared for publication in Finland, I knew with certainty that Vyrubova had taken nothing new out of Russia with her.
    Unlike her prudent friend, the tsarina had (fortunately for us) been unable to burn most of her letters in which she expressed her undying love for Nicky. Almost all these letters she exchanged with Nicholas have survived. And endlessly referred to in them is ‘Our Friend’. If one must judge Rasputin’s relations with the royal family before 1914 chiefly on the basis of the testimony of other