Maria Rasputin - Life Following The Revolution

Life Following The Revolution

Maria was briefly engaged during World War I to a Georgian officer surnamed Pankhadze. Pankhadze had avoided being sent to the war front thanks to Rasputin's intervention and was doing his military service with the reserve battalions in St. Petersburg.

After Rasputin's murder, Rasputin's followers persuaded Maria to marry Boris Soloviev, the charismatic son of Nikolai Soloviev, the Treasurer of the Holy Synod and one of her father's admirers. Boris Soloviev quickly emerged as Rasputin's successor after the murder. Soloviev, who had studied hypnotism, attended meetings at which Rasputin's followers attempted to communicate with the dead through prayer meetings and séances. Maria also attended the meetings, but later wrote in her diary that she could not understand why her father kept telling her to "love Boris" when the group spoke to him at the séances. She said she did not like Boris at all. Soloviev was no more enthusiastic about Maria. In his own diary, he wrote that his wife was not even useful for sexual relations, because there were so many women who had bodies he found more attractive than hers. Nonetheless, she married Soloviev on October 5, 1917. They returned to Siberia and lived for several weeks in Rasputin's house at Pokrovskoye. Later, Soloviev took jewels from the Tsar and Tsarina to help arrange for their escape, but kept the funds for himself. Later, after the Bolsheviks took power, Soloviev turned in the officers who had come to Ekaterinburg to plan the escape of the Romanovs. Soloviev lost the money he had obtained from the jewels during the civil war that followed. There were also several reports of young people in Russia passing themselves off as Romanov escapees following the Revolution. Soloviev defrauded prominent Russian families by asking for money for a Romanov impostor to escape to China. Soloviev also found young women willing to masquerade as one of the grand duchesses for the benefit of the families he had defrauded.