To Kill Rasputin: The Life and Death of Grigori Rasputin (Revealing History) (14 page)

Reporters covering the murder of Rasputin at the time stated his age as being fifty. When, six months later, the new Provisional Government set up an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry to examine Rasputin’s activities, evidence from witnesses who had known him in Siberia and elsewhere was collected by its chief investigator, E.P. Stimson, a respected lawyer from Kharkov. Stimson concluded that Rasputin was born in either ‘1864 or 1865’.
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Tsarina Alexandra referred to him as ‘elder’. He was in fact younger than the Tsar, and it was, perhaps, for this reason that he sought to inflate his age.

According to contemporary accounts,
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Rasputin’s father Efim was comparatively well-off in terms of Pokrovskoe peasants, who in turn had a better standard of living than the peasants in European Russia, who lived in chimneyless log huts. Efim’s single-storey cabin had four rooms – unlike many peasants, who used stretched animal bladders to cover their windows, Efim could afford glass. In later years, Rasputin proudly recalled that as a child he ate white bread rather than the brown bread suffered by peasants in European Russia – and fish and cabbage soup.
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Rasputin’s mother related that the young Grigori often ‘stared at the sky’ and at first she feared for his sanity.
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Stories abound about his developing powers as a youth – he seems to have had a way with animals and became a horse whisperer. Efim Rasputin had a favourite story
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of how his son’s gift first showed itself. Efim mentioned at a family meal that one of his horses had gone lame that day and could have pulled a hamstring. Grigori got up from the table and went out to the stable. Efim followed and saw Grigori place his hand on the animal’s hamstring. Efim then led the horse out into the yard – its lameness had apparently gone. According to his daughter Maria, Rasputin became a kind of ‘spiritual veterinarian’,
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talking to sick cattle and horses, curing them with a few whispered words and a comforting hand.

Stories also abound concerning Grigori’s supposed ability to discover missing objects. On one occasion, a horse was stolen. A village meeting was called to discuss the theft. Grigori pointed at one of the richest peasants in the village and declared him the guilty man. Despite his protests, a posse of villagers followed the man back to his homestead and discovered the stolen horse there. As a result, the man was given a traditional Siberian beating.

Rasputin’s daughter Maria later wrote that he could also predict the deaths of villagers and the coming of strangers to Pokrovskoe.
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Much of what Maria was to record in her book and published interviews is, however, very much open to question. For example, the Provisional Government Inquiry of 1917 found Pokrovskoe witnesses who had a somewhat different perspective on her father. ‘They note that Efim Rasputin drank vodka heavily,’ the investigator wrote. ‘As a boy Rasputin was always dirty and untidy so that boys of his age called him a “snotter.
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Maria’s claims concerning her father’s early life are typical of the retrospective accounts that have come to be accepted without question by many subsequent writers and researchers. It suited Rasputin’s retrospective image to establish that his gifts were evident during childhood. A number of Maria’s claims are very much open to question and are at variance with testimonies given by Pokrovskoe villagers.

In August 1877, when Grigori was eight years old, his ten-year-old brother Mischa died. The two brothers were swimming in the River Toura when Mischa was caught by a current, dragging Grigori with him. Although the two boys were pulled out by a farmer, Mischa contracted pneumonia and died shortly after.

At the age of nineteen, Grigori attended a festival at Abalatski Monastery, where he met a girl two years older than himself, named Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina, from the nearby village of Dubrovnoye. Following a six-month courtship, they married. The precise date of their marriage is unknown, although the 1917 investigation believes it was 1889.
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Marriage seems to have had little impact on Grigori or his lifestyle. He continued to spend his evenings at the tavern. According to E.I. Kartavtsev, a neighbour of the Rasputins in Pokrovskoe, who was sixty-seven years old at the time of the 1917 investigation, he had ‘caught Grigori stealing my fence poles’.
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Kartavtsev went on to explain that,

he had cut them up and put them in his cart and was about to drive off when I caught him in the act. I demanded that Grigori take them to the Constable, and when he refused and made to strike me with an axe, I, in my turn, hit him with a perch so hard that blood ran out of his nose and his mouth in a stream and he fell to the ground unconscious. At first I thought I’d killed him. When he started to move I made him come to take him to the Constable. Rasputin did not feel like going, but I hit him several times with a fist in the face, after which he went to the Constable voluntarily.

Not long after this event, Kartavtsev recalled that a pair of his horses was stolen from his meadow. ‘On the night of the theft I guarded the horses myself… I saw that Rasputin approached them with his pals, Konstantin and Trofim, but I didn’t think much of it until a few hours later I discovered the horses were not there. Right after that I went home to check whether Rasputin was in. He was there the following day, but his pals had gone.’
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As a result of the thefts of the poles and the horses, the Pokrovskoe villagers convened to discuss what should be done about Rasputin and his errant ways. Konstantin and Trofim were expelled from the village for horse-stealing. Rasputin was not, but he faced charges of stealing the poles and a consignment of furs in the local court. He was also accused of stealing a consignment of furs that went missing from a cart he was driving to Tyumen. In his defence, he claimed that he had been attacked by robbers.

According to his daughter Maria, he denied being a thief, and maintained that since he was convinced that other people shared his second sight, and so could track down any stolen object, he could never bring himself to steal.
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Whatever the reality, Rasputin left the village for Verkhoturye Monastery, some 250 miles north-west of Pokrovskoe, shortly afterwards.

Maria asserted that his departure from the village was the result of giving a ride to a young divinity student in his cart, who apparently encouraged Grigori to go to the monastery.
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Many years later Rasputin told a similar story to the Tsar and Tsarina. According to the imperial tutor, Gilliard, Rasputin had been hired to drive a priest to the monastery. During the journey the priest implored Grigori to confess his sins and urged him to devote himself to God. ‘These persuasions,’ said Gilliard, ‘impressed Grigori so much that he was filled with a wish to abandon his dark and desolate life.’
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The reality behind Rasputin’s timely departure from Pokrovskoe seems to have had little to do with such fantasies. Numerous witnesses told the 1917 Inquiry that Rasputin’s involvement in local criminality was now such that he thought it best to make an exit, preferring Verkhoturye Monastery to a criminal record and a custodial sentence.

Rasputin’s three-month stay at the monastery, according to the 1917 investigation, ended ‘the first, early, wild, loose period of his life’. As a result, ‘Rasputin was to become a different person’.
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It left anguish in his soul ‘…in the form of extreme nervousness, constant restless, jerky movements, incoherent speech, the permanent interchange of extreme nervous agitation and subsequent depression’.
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When Rasputin came home he continued to express his delight in the natural world, which had impressed him deeply. He had given up meat and sugar and alcohol. He seemed to be in a state of ecstatic mysticism a lot of the time, but the people of Pokrovskoe snorted at his praying and his visions. He was the same old lying Grisha, as far as they could see.

Rasputin ignored them. Around the age of thirty, wild-eyed and unwashed, shouting and waving as he travelled, and sleepless for nights on end every spring, he was an eccentric figure who vaguely represented the Old Beliefs, the ancient Christian culture of ‘Holy Rus’ whose sorcerers, healers and false messiahs attracted many followers. In particular he headed north and west to the large monastery at Verkhoturye in the Urals, where he worshipped at the shrine of St Simeon of Verkhoturye. This St Simeon had died of fasting and self-neglect early in the seventeenth century, but Rasputin looked upon his spirit as his guardian and mentor.

At some time in his wanderings and contacts with the adherents of ‘Holy Rus’, Rasputin had become involved with the Khlysti. These were the followers of Daniel Filippovich, who had been crucified and resurrected more than once (a story reminiscent of Yusupov’s later account of Rasputin who, allegedly, was poisoned and shot at point-blank range and left for dead before leaping scarily to his feet half an hour later). There were several messiahs like Filippovich in the sect’s history and most of them were said to have been raised from the dead.

The Khlysti were harmless enough, but to the Orthodox mind they were the Devil incarnate. Adherents to the sect believed that repentance was insignificant unless they had something to repent for
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So ‘sinning’ – fornication, and plenty of it – was a necessary preamble to repentance. Thus encouraged to indulge themselves, the Khlysti exulted in ecstatic secret meetings, with priests in nightshirts whirling like dervishes into elevated states of consciousness and behaving ‘sinfully’ with their attendant womenfolk before prophesying, praying and repenting.
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Rasputin’s gift of prophecy seemed particularly significant to his followers; he had a ‘sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom’.
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But none of this must be divulged… Orthodox priests were appalled when in 1903 they enquired into Rasputin and were told that he held dubious services in a secret chapel under a stable in Pokrovskoe.

Driven underground, the Khlysti referred to each other as ‘Ours’ or ‘Our own’. It was a sect ‘of the people’ that laid claim to a special kind of truth vouchsafed only to the poor. At least, it was ‘of the people’, until Rasputin conquered the ladies of St Petersburg.

His climb was extraordinary; he leapt from one social foothold to the next, up and up in a matter of months. In 1903 his prophecies, and in particular his frankly expressed insights into the character and aims of his listeners, impressed the archimandrite of Kazan. Thus he obtained letters of introduction to an important bishop in St Petersburg, who in turn introduced him to Bishop Feofan, confessor to the Tsarina. Invited to stay at Feofan’s St Petersburg apartment, Rasputin was introduced to Militsa, the wife of Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaivich, who was sickly. Militsa was one of the two Black Sisters, as they were called, not only because they were dark but because they were from Montenegro. The other sister was Anastasia, the mistress (and later the wife) of that very tall and martial Grand Duke, Nikolai Nikolaivich, who would so badly offend Rasputin during the war.

At this time of social upheaval and impending international crisis, Militsa and Anastasia were close to the Tsarina. People sneered at them as her self-appointed ‘procurers of Holy Men’. Rasputin was the last and cleverest of a long line of these. The Tsarina was credulous about occult happenings and omens, so much so that she seemed silly even in Russia, where the existence of the supernatural was generally accepted.

From her earliest youth it had been clear that the future Tsarina Alexandra of Hesse lacked a sense of humour. In her teens she had received a proposal of marriage from Prince Albert Victor, or Eddy as he was more commonly known, the heir apparent to the English throne. Eddy, who was to die young, leaving the throne to his brother George, was a sweet-natured dandy and not nearly religious enough. Nicholas, the young heir to the throne of Russia, on the other hand, lived in a permanent state of anxiety and would one day be head of the Russian Orthodox Church. But she was a Lutheran…

Alexandra struggled with her religious conscience for more than three years before she consented to marry the Tsarevich Nicholas. He was a repressed, insignificant young man, physically almost the double of his English cousin Prince George. She made a more imposing figure than he did, in her clumpy heels beneath long swishing skirts, and a fussy hat like a huge meringue.

They had not been married long when Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, died in 1894. To celebrate the coronation of Nicholas and Alexandra, an outdoor festival was arranged for the poor, but hundreds of thousands turned up in search of a free meal and over a thousand of them were trampled to death in the crush. Grand Duke Sergei was Governor-General of Moscow at the time, and his mismanagement was blamed. Nicholas and Alexandra had arranged to attend a ball being held in their honour by the French that evening, and did not cancel. As they danced, crushed bodies were still being removed from the scene of the disaster by the cartload. Insensitivity of that kind was not easily forgotten.

St Petersburg society despised Alexandra anyway. Had some gaiety relieved the severity of her character she would have been forgiven almost anything, but she was haughty and distant and did not make friends easily. She was appalled by anything remotely improper, while St Petersburg society was quite relaxed and unshockable.
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Georgina Buchanan, Sir George Buchanan’s wife, who knew her when she was young, accused her of a ‘naïve simplicity’ allied with ‘uncompromising and domineering self-assurance’. She ‘strove from the very first to influence her husband to what she considered was the right way of thinking’.
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Alexandra seized upon the notion that the essence of Russianness was expressed by ‘the people’, and they all, from Archangel to Vladivostok, were fervently loyal. It followed that criticism was alien. In her mystic belief about ‘the people’ she echoed Militsa, but also her grandmother, Queen Victoria. The old Queen’s principles had influenced her when she was a girl, andVictoria was fond of the illusion that she was closer to the spirit of the English than the aristocracy were. Like Alexandra, the old lady could be self-righteous and was deeply wounded by bitchiness. They both wallowed in dramatic self-pity when the opportunity presented itself. But Victoria was sharp and livelyminded and Alexandra was entirely unburdened by reason.