Read Online Red Icon by Sam Eastland - Free Book Online

letters, sometimes more than once, but it had lately begun to seem as if the letters weren’t really written to him. He could not escape the feeling that his wife was pouring out her heart to another man – someone who looked like him, who sounded like him, who behaved like him – but who was not him. It was as if she had created an illusion more in keeping with the man she wanted for a husband, in whom the failings of reality had all been scrubbed away. As the Tsar read his wife’s most recent tirade against the members of the Russian parliament, who had begun to loudly criticise the handling of the war, he knew she was appealing to a mirage of his true self, a man who might sweep aside all opposition to his will in a wave of rage and ruthlessness. ‘Be Peter the Great!’ she pleaded. ‘Be Ivan the Terrible. Crush them all!’ In Alexandra’s mind, nothing less would restore the love and confidence of ordinary Russians. Rage equals love. Ruthlessness demands respect. The man she had invented would understand these things, and the world she had invented for him to live in would obey such contradictions. But here he was, the ruler of an Empire, knowing in his heart that all the raging in the world would not bring back the millions who had been killed in the fighting, or the millions more who would die before this war was over.

6 June 1915
     
    Petrograd
     
     
    Rasputin’s apartment, located in a quiet section of the Gorokhovaya Ulitsa in Petrograd, did not belong to him. It was on permanent loan from one of his many benefactors, most of whom cared less for Rasputin than they did for his influence over the Tsar.
    The power of Rasputin’s opinions, particularly with the Tsarina, had never been publicly acknowledged. It was, nevertheless, the worst-kept secret in Russia. Each week, Rasputin received dozens of visitors, who trudged up the stairs to his apartment, their pockets stuffed with cash, hoping for the Siberian monk’s help in currying favour with the Romanovs. Sometimes it was the matter of a military contract, supplying saddles for the cavalry or hobnails for a million pairs of marching boots. Other times, it concerned an unfavourable ruling of the court which could, with a few words from the Tsar, be overturned. The visitors pleaded their cases, while Rasputin lounged upon a threadbare couch, sighing and staring at the ceiling. As they departed, the visitors emptied their pockets, heaping stacks of money in a large blue-and-white washbasin, secure in their minds that their generosity would not go unrewarded. But the names of these people, along with their long-winded and carefully rehearsed appeals, were forgotten even before they reached the bottom of the stairs. And the money, with which Rasputin could have retired a wealthy man, would usually be given away to the next person he saw who looked as if they didn’t have enough.
    Pekkala entered the courtyard, which was damp and gloomy and smelled of the mildew which clung to the painted stone. Shards of broken green glass lay on the cobblestones, the remains of bottles, pitched out of the window high above, which had once contained the sweet Georgian wine that was Rasputin’s favourite.
    Rasputin had not always been a heavy drinker. This came only after the attempt on his life, when an insane woman named Khioniya Guseva, who had become convinced he was the anti-Christ, found him in the street and stabbed him with a butcher’s knife. Although Rasputin recovered physically from the attack, inwardly he was never the same. It was as if, in that moment when the knife blade pierced his flesh, he glimpsed the horrors that awaited him on New Year’s Eve of 1916, in the halls of the Yusupov Palace.
    As Pekkala began to climb the stairs, a woman passed him on the way down. She was in her late forties, with a high forehead and small, deep-set eyes which she averted from Pekkala as she clattered down the steps in patent leather shoes. With a passing glance, Pekkala