Grigori Rasputin

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"Rasputin" redirects here. For other uses, see Rasputin (disambiguation).

Grigori Rasputin

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin (or Grigori Yefimovich Novyh) (Russian: Григо́рий Ефи́мович Распу́тин / Григорий Ефимович Новых) (January 22 [O.S. January 10] 1869–December 29 [O.S. December 16] 1916) was a Russian mystic who is perceived as having influenced the later days of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, his wife the Tsaritsa Alexandra, and their only son the Tsarevich Alexei.

Rasputin had often been called the "Mad Monk", although he was never a monk and made no secret of being married. Some considered him to be a "strannik" (religious pilgrim) or even a starets (ста́рец) ("elder", a title usually reserved for monk-confessors) and believed him to be a psychic and faith healer.

It has been argued that Rasputin, not an ordained Russian mystic and holy man, helped discredit the tsarist government, leading to the fall of the Romanov dynasty in 1917. Contemporary opinions variously saw Rasputin as a saintly mystic, visionary, healer, and prophet, or as a debauched religious charlatan. Historians can find both to be true, but there is much uncertainty: accounts of his life have often been based on dubious memoirs, hearsay, and legend.

For some time, Rasputin's birth date remained questionable. "It is still not known with any certainty when Rasputin was born, and all the books which deal with him and his career give differing dates; not even his biographers — and there have been many — have been able to agree. The closest one can come with certainty is sometime between the years 1863 and 1873." It was not until recently that new documents surfaced revealing Rasputin's birth date as January 10, 1869 O.S.

Early life

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Rasputin as depicted in a TV docudrama

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born a peasant in the small village of Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River in the Tobolsk guberniya (now Tyumen Oblast) in Siberia. Nobody knows much about his childhood, and what people do know was most likely passed down through his family members. He had two known siblings, a sister named Maria and an older brother named Dmitri. His sister Maria was said to have been epileptic and was drowned in a river. One day when Rasputin was playing with Dmitri, Dmitri fell into a pond and Grigori jumped in to save him, and they were both pulled out by a passerby. Eventually Dmitri died of pneumonia. The death of his siblings greatly affected Rasputin which is probably the reason why he named his two children Maria and Dmitri.

The myths surrounding Rasputin portray him as showing indications of supernatural powers throughout his childhood. One example of these powers was when he mysteriously identified the man who had stolen one of his father's horses (Efimy Rasputin, Grigory Rasputin's father, raised horses). Rasputin had a knack for identifying thieves, and he assumed that everyone possessed this supernatural power.

When he was around the age of eighteen, he spent three months in the Verkhoturye Monastery, possibly as penance for theft. His experience there, combined with a reported vision of the Mother of God on his return, turned him toward the life of a religious mystic and wanderer. He also evidently came into contact with the banned Christian sect known as the khlysty (flagellants), whose impassioned services ending in physical exhaustion led to rumors that religious and sexual ecstasy were combined in their rituals. Suspicions, generally not accepted by historians, that Rasputin was one of the Khlysts — how else, it has been said, to explain the notorious sexual life of this "holy man" — threatened his reputation to the end of his life. Shortly after leaving the monastery, he visited a holy man named Makariy, whose hut was nearby. Makariy had an enormous influence on Rasputin, who would model himself after the older man. Rasputin married Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina in 1889 and had three children with her, Dmitri, Varvara, and Maria, as well as another child with another woman. In 1901, he left his home in Pokrovskoye as a strannik, or pilgrim. During the time of his journeying, he traveled to Greece and Jerusalem. In 1903, Rasputin arrived in Saint Petersburg, where he gradually gained a reputation as a starets, or holy man, with healing and prophetical powers.

Healer to the Tsarevich

Rasputin was wandering as a pilgrim in Siberia when he heard reports of Tsarevich Alexei's illness (it was not publicly known that Alexei had hemophilia) in 1904. This disease was widespread among European royalty descended from Queen Victoria of England, who was Alexei's great-grandmother. When the young Tsarevich got a bruise after he fell off of a horse, he suffered from internal bleeding for days while vacationing with his family. The Tsaritsa, looking everywhere for help, asked her best friend Anna Vyrubova to secure the help of the charismatic peasant healer in 1905. He was said to possess the ability to heal through prayer, and he was indeed able to give the boy some relief, despite the doctors' prediction that he would die. Skeptics have claimed that he did so by hypnosis, though during a particularly grave crisis, Rasputin, from his home in Siberia, was believed to have eased the suffering of the Tsarevich (in Saint Petersburg) through prayer. His practical advice, such as "Don't let the doctors bother him too much, let him rest," may also have been of great assistance in allowing Alexei and his worried mother to relax, so that the child's own natural healing process might take place. Others believe he used leeches to stop the boy's bleeding for the moment; however, this is unlikely to have been successful, as leech saliva contains hirudin and other natural anticoagulants. Every time the boy had an injury causing internal or external bleeding, the Tsaritsa contacted Rasputin, whereupon the Tsarevich subsequently got better, and this made it seem as if Rasputin was effectively healing him.

Diarmuid Jeffreys has proposed that the medical treatment which was halted due to Rasputin's intervention included aspirin, then a newly-available (1899) "wonder drug" for treatment of pain. Since aspirin is an anticoagulant (as was only discovered in 1971), this would have increased the bleeding into joints which was causing Alexei's joint swelling and pain.

The Tsar referred to Rasputin as "our friend" and a "holy man", perhaps a sign of the trust the family put in him. Rasputin had considerable personal and political influence on Alexandra.

The Tsar and Tsaritsa considered him to be a man of God and a religious prophet, and Alexandra believed God spoke to her through Rasputin. This relationship can also be viewed in the context of the very strong, traditional, age-old bond between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Russian leadership. Another important factor was probably the Tsaritsa's German-Protestant origin: she was highly fascinated by her new Orthodox religion — which puts a great deal of faith in the healing power of prayer — but seems to have lacked some discernment regarding its practices.

Controversy

Rasputin among admirers, 1914

Rasputin soon became a controversial figure, becoming involved in a paradigm of sharp political struggle involving monarchist, anti-monarchist, revolutionary and other political forces and interests. He was accused by many eminent persons of various misdeeds, ranging from an unrestricted sexual life (including raping a nun) to undue political domination over the royal family.

While fascinated by him, the Saint Petersburg elite did not widely accept Rasputin: he did not fit in with the royal family. Rasputin and the Russian Orthodox Church had a very tense relationship. The Holy Synod frequently attacked Rasputin, accusing him of a variety of immoral or evil practices. Such anecdotal evidence about Rasputin's life should be treated skeptically. However, because Rasputin was a court official, he and his apartment were under 24-hour surveillance; accordingly, there exists some credible evidence about his lifestyle in the form of the famous "staircase notes", reports from police spies which were not only given to the Tsar, but published in the newspapers.

According to Rasputin's daughter, Maria, Rasputin did "look into" the Khlysty sect, and rejected it. One Khlyst practice was known as "rejoicing," (радение), a ritual that sought to overcome the human sexual urges by engaging in group sexual activities so that in consciously sinning together, the sin’s power over the human was nullified. Rasputin was particularly appalled by the belief that grace is found through self-flagellation.

Like many spiritually minded Russians, Rasputin spoke of salvation as depending less on the clergy and the church than on seeking the spirit of God within. He also maintained that sin and repentance were interdependent and necessary to salvation. Thus, he claimed, yielding to temptation (for him personally, this meant sex and alcohol), even to humiliation (to dispel the sin of vanity), was a necessary step on the road to repentance and salvation. Rasputin was deeply opposed to war, both from a moral point of view and as likely to lead to political catastrophe. During the war years, Rasputin’s increasing drunkenness, sexual promiscuity, willingness to accept bribes in return for helping petitioners who flocked to his apartment, and efforts to have his critics dismissed from their posts made him appear increasingly cynical. Another way to look at this is that like most Orthodox Christians, Rasputin was brought up with the belief that the body is a sacred gift from God. Attaining divine grace through sin seems to have been one of the central secret doctrines that Rasputin preached to (and practiced with) his inner circle of society ladies. The idea that one can attain grace through correction of sin is not unique. It is also understood that sin is an inescapable part of the human condition, and the responsibility of a believer is to be keenly aware of his sins and be willing to confess them, thereby attaining humility.

During World War I he became a focus of accusations of unpatriotic influence at court; the unpopular tsaritsa was of German descent, and she was accused of being a spy in German employ.

When Rasputin expressed an interest in going to the front to bless the troops early in the war, the Commander-in-Chief, Grand Duke Nicholas, promised to hang him if he showed up. Rasputin then claimed that he had a revelation that the Russian armies would not be successful until the Tsar personally took command. With this, the ill-prepared Nicholas proceeded to take personal command of the Russian army, with dire consequences for himself and for Russia.

While Tsar Nicholas II was away at the front, Rasputin's influence over Tsaritsa Alexandra increased immensely. He soon became her confidant and personal advisor. He also convinced her to fill some government offices with his own handpicked candidates. To further advance his power, Rasputin cohabitated with upper-class women in exchange for granting political favours. Because of World War I and the ossifying effects of feudalism and a meddling government bureacracy, Russia’s economy was declining at a rapid rate. Many at the time placed the blame with Alexandra and with Rasputin, because of his influence over her. An example:

Vladimir Purishkevich was an outspoken member of the Duma. On November 19, 1916, Purishkevich made a rousing speech in the Duma, in which he stated, 'The tsar’s ministers who have been turned into marionettes, marionettes whose threads have been taken firmly in hand by Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna — the evil genius of Russia and the tsaritsa… who has remained a German on the Russian throne and alien to the country and its people.' Felix Yusupov attended the speech and afterwards contacted Purishkevich, who quickly agreed to participate in the murder of Rasputin.

Rasputin’s influence over the royal family was used against him and the Romanovs by politicians and journalists who wanted to weaken the integrity of the dynasty, make the tsar give up his absolute political power, and separate the Russian Orthodox Church from the state. Rasputin unintentionally contributed to their propaganda by having public disputes with clergy members, bragging over his ability to influence both the tsar and tsaritsa, and by his dissolute lifestyle. Nobles in influential positions around the tsar as well as some parties of the Duma clamored for his removal from the court. Perhaps inadvertently, Rasputin added to diminishing respect for the tsar by his subjects.

Assassination

The legends recounting the death of Rasputin are perhaps even more bizarre than his strange life.

According to Greg King's 1996 book The Man Who Killed Rasputin, a previous attempt on Rasputin's life had been made and failed. Rasputin was visiting his wife and children in his hometown, Pokrovskoye, along the Tura River, in Siberia. On June 29, 1914, he had either just received a telegram, or was just exiting church, when he was attacked by Khionia Guseva. A former prostitute, she had become a disciple of the monk Iliodor — once a friend of Rasputin's, who had become disgusted with his behavior and his disrespectful talk about the royal family. Iliodor appealed to women who had been harmed by Rasputin and formed a survivors' support group, with the intention of discrediting or killing him. Guseva thrust a knife into Rasputin's abdomen. His entrails hung out of what seemed like a mortal wound. After the attack, Guseva supposedly screamed, "I have killed the antichrist!" After intensive surgery Rasputin recovered. It was said about his survival: "the soul of this cursed muzhik was sewn on his body." His daughter Maria points out in her memoirs that he was never the same after that; he seemed to tire more easily, and frequently took opium for pain.

The murder of Rasputin has become legend, some of it invented by the very men who killed him, so that it becomes difficult to discern exactly what happened; however, it is generally agreed that on December 16, 1916, having decided that Rasputin's influence over the tsarina made him too dangerous to the empire, a group of nobles led by Prince Felix Yusupov, and the Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich (one of the few Romanov family members to escape the annihilation of the family) apparently lured Rasputin to the Yusupovs' Moika Palace, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a large amount of cyanide. According to the legend, Rasputin was not affected, although there was enough poison to kill ten men. Maria Rasputin's account says that if her father ate poison, it was not in the cakes or wine, because after the attack by Guseva, he had hyperacidity, and avoided anything with sugar. She expressed doubt that he was poisoned at all.

Determined to finish the job — and now we are fully in the realm of narrative legend — Yusupov worried that Rasputin would live until morning, so that the conspirators would not have time to conceal his body. He ran upstairs to consult with the others, then came back down and shot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell. The company then left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to grab one. While at the palace he went to check on the body, Rasputin opened his eyes, grabbed Felix by the throat, strangling him. Rasputin ominously whispered "you bad boy" in Yusupov's ear, and then threw him across the room and escaped. As he made his bid for freedom, the rest of the conspirators arrived and fired at him. After being hit three times in the back, he fell. As they neared his body, they found he remarkably was still struggling and trying to get up so they clubbed him into submission; then, after wrapping his body in a sheet, they threw him into the icy Neva River. Three days later the body of Rasputin — poisoned, shot four times, and badly beaten — was recovered from the river and autopsied. The cause of death was drowning. His arms were apparently found in an upright position, as if he had tried to claw his way out from under the ice. In the autopsy, it was found that he was poisoned, and that the poison alone should have killed him.

Subsequently, the Empress Alexandra buried Rasputin's body in the grounds of Tsarskoye Selo. After the February Revolution, a group of workers from Saint Petersburg uncovered Rasputin's body, carried it into a nearby wood and burned it.

Recent evidence

The details of the assassination given by Felix Yusupov have never stood up to close examination. There were many versions of his account: the statement he gave to the Saint Petersburg police on December 16, 1916; the account he gave whilst in exile in the Crimea in 1917; his 1927 book; and the accounts given under oath to libel juries in 1934 and 1965. No two accounts were entirely identical. Until recently, however, no other credible, evidence-based theories have been available.

According to the unpublished 1916 autopsy report by Professor Kossorotov, and subsequent reviews by Dr. Vladimir Zharov in 1993 and Professor Derrick Pounder in 2004–2005, no active poison was found in Rasputin's stomach. It could not have been said with certainty that he drowned, as the water found on his lungs is a common non-specific autopsy finding. All three sources agree that Rasputin had been systematically beaten and attacked with a bladed weapon, but most important, there were discrepancies regarding the number and caliber of handguns used.

This discovery may have significantly changed the whole premise and account of Rasputin's death. British intelligence reports between London and Saint Petersburg in 1916 indicate that the British were extremely concerned about Rasputin's replacement of pro-British ministers in the Russian government, but more important, his apparent insistence on withdrawing Russian troops from World War I. This withdrawal would have allowed the Germans to move their Eastern Front troops to the Western Front, massively outnumbering the Allies and spelling almost certain victory. Whether this was actually Rasputin's intention or whether he was simply concerned about the huge number of casualties (as the tsarina's letters indicated) is in dispute, but it is clear that the British viewed him as a real danger.

According to Professor Pounder, of the three shots fired into Rasputin's body, the third (which entered his forehead) was instantly fatal. This third shot also provides some intriguing evidence. In Pounder's view, concurred in by the Firearms Department of the Imperial War Museum in London, the third shot was fired by a gun different from those responsible for the other two wounds. The "size and prominence of the abraded margin" suggested a large lead non-jacketed bullet. At that time, the majority of weapons used hard metal jacketed bullets, with Britain virtually alone in using lead unjacketed bullets for their officers' Webley revolvers. Pounder came to the conclusion that the bullet which caused the fatal shot was a Webley .455 inch unjacketed round, and was the best fit with the available forensic evidence.

Witnesses to the murder stated that the only man present with a Webley revolver was Lieutenant Oswald Rayner, a British officer who was attached to the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) station in Saint Petersburg. This account was further backed up during an audience between the British Ambassador, Sir George Buchanan, and Tsar Nicholas, when Nicholas stated that he suspected a young Englishman who had been an old school friend of Yusupov. Indeed, Rayner had known Yusupov at Oxford University. Another SIS officer in Saint Petersburg at the time, Captain Stephen Alley, had actually been born in the Yusupov Palace in 1876, and both families had strong ties.

Confirmation that Rayner, along with another officer, Captain John Scale, met with Yusupov in the weeks leading up to the assassination can be found in the diary of their chauffeur, William Compton, who recorded all the visits. The last entry was the night before the murder. According to Compton, "it is a little known fact that Rasputin was shot not by a Russian but by an Englishman". He indicated that the culprit was a lawyer from the same part of the country as Compton himself. Rayner was indeed born some ten miles from Compton's hometown, and throughout his life described himself as a "barrister-at-law", despite never practicing that profession.

Evidence that the assassination attempt had not gone quite to plan is hinted at in a letter that Alley wrote to Scale eight days after the murder, saying "Although matters here have not proceeded entirely to plan, our objective has clearly been achieved... a few awkward questions have already been asked about wider involvement. Rayner is attending to loose ends and will no doubt brief you".

Upon his return to England, Oswald Rayner not only confided to his cousin, Rose Jones, that he had been present at Rasputin's murder, but also showed family members a bullet which he claimed he had acquired at the murder scene.

None of this is conclusive evidence of what happened that night of 16 December - 17 December, but it provides a more logical evidence-based account of what occurred. Rayner burnt all his papers before he died in 1961, and his only son also died four years later.

"The spirit of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin"

After his death, his secretary Simonovich realized that Rasputin had moved a lot of money into his daughter Maria's account, and generally set all his affairs in order.

Weeks before he was assassinated in December 1916, according to his secretary Simonovich, Rasputin wrote the following:

"I write and leave behind me this letter at St. Petersburg. I feel that I shall leave life before January 1. I wish to make known to the Russian people, to Papa, to the Russian Mother and to the Children, to the land of Russia, what they must understand. If I am killed by common assassins, and especially by my brothers the Russian peasants, you, Tsar of Russia, will have nothing to fear for your children, they will reign for hundreds of years in Russia. But if I am murdered by boyars, nobles, and if they shed my blood, their hands will remain soiled with my blood, for twenty-five years they will not wash their hands from my blood. They will leave Russia. Brothers will kill brothers, and they will kill each other and hate each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobles in the country. Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that Grigori has been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death, then no one in the family, that is to say, none of your children or relations, will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people. I go, and I feel in me the divine command to tell the Russian Tsar how he must live if I have disappeared. You must reflect and act prudently. Think of your safety and tell your relations that I have paid for them with my blood. I shall be killed. I am no longer among the living. Pray, pray, be strong, think of your blessed family. -Grigori"

Why he wrote this prophetic letter, if it was not made up by Simonovich, is a mystery. Some speculate that Rasputin had a spiritual vision foreshadowing such an event; he did not say so, however. Others believe that Rasputin knew that he was widely reviled by many of the Russian people at the time he wrote the letter and that some wanted him dead (although many of his fellow peasants seem to have supported his success with the royal court). After the great speech which inspired Yusupov to make his move, rumors were flying about the Duma that something was going to happen to Rasputin soon, and he may simply have gotten wind of the rumors without knowing who the conspirators were.

Daughter

Rasputin's daughter Matryona (Maria) Rasputina (1898-1977) after the October Revolution emigrated to France, then to USA, working as a dancer and then as a tiger trainer in a circus. She left memoirs about her father, wherein she painted an almost saintly picture of her father and insisted that most negative stories about him are based on slander and the misinterpretations of facts by his enemies.

Reputation

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Rasputin

The contemporary press, as well as sensationalist articles and books published in the 1920s and 1930s (one of them even by Yusupov), turned the charismatic peasant into something of a twentieth century folk belief. To Westerners, Rasputin became the embodiment of purported Russian backwardness, superstition, irrationality and licentiousness, and an object of sensational interest; to the Russian Communists, he represented all that was evil in the old regime and had been overcome in the revolution. Yet to some Russians, he remained a symbol of the voice of the peasantry, and some (Russians) to this day reject the beliefs, honoring the man. However, the Moscow Patriarchate has condemned the fledgling movement seeking canonization of Rasputin. In reference to Rasputin's promiscuity, Moscow's Patriarch Alexius II said in a statement in 2003: "This is madness! What believer would want to stay in a Church that equally venerates murderers and martyrs, lechers and saints?"

Name meaning

The name Rasputin in Russian does not mean "licentious," as is often claimed. There is, however, a very similar Russian adjective rasputny (распу́тный) which does mean "licentious" and the corresponding noun rasputnik. There is no definite explanation of the origin of this not uncommon surname which does not have a "disgraceful" meaning, as the contemporary Russian writer Valentin Rasputin would be quick to explain. There are at least two options for the root of the word. One of them is "put' ," which means "way," "road." Close nouns are rasputye, a place where the roads diverge or converge and rasputitsa (распу́тица, "muddy road season"). Some historians argue that the name Rasputin may be a place name, since it does roughly signify "a place where two rivers meet", which describes the area from which the Rasputin family originates. Another possibility is "put', " which gives rise to the verb "putat' ": "entangle" or "mix up," with "rasputat' " being its antonym: "detangle," "untie," "clean up a misunderstanding," etc.

However the most well founded explanation is a standard Russian surname derivation from the old Slavic name "Rasputa" ("Rasputko") (recorded as early as in sixteenth century) with the meaning "ill-behaved child," the one whose ways are against traditions or the will of parents.

It is said that Rasputin tried to have his name changed to the inconspicuous "Novykh" after his first pilgrimage to the Holy Land ("Novykh" - from the Russian Новый, "New" connotes to "Novice"), but that is a subject of dispute.

See also

• Cultural depictions of Rasputin
• Rasputin's penis

References

• Furhmann, Joseph T. Rasputin: A Life. New York, 1990.
• Radzinsky, Edvard, Rasputin: The Last Word. London, 2000.

External links

• The Alexander Palace Time Machine Bios-Rasputin - bio of Rasputin
• Okhrana Surveillance Report on Rasputin - from the Soviet Krasnyi Arkiv
• The Evil Monk: The Life and Times of Gregory Efimovich Rasputin
• Rasputin, Grigory Yefimovich, Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia
• Russian Revolutions of 1917
• The Murder of Rasputin
• Rasputin the Musical by Michael Rapp
• BBC's Rasputin murder reconstruction
• RASPUTIN Grigory Efimovich - article about Rasputin at Encyclopaedia of St. Petersburg