Larger than life.
Legendary.
Debaucherous.
Mesmerizing.
Master of the occult.
An illiterate pig.
A monk.
A healer.
A scoundrel.
I think I could go on for a few minutes in that vein and only scratch the surface of
the descriptions that abound about the most famous figure of late imperial Russia, Rasputin.
I'm Indy Neidell; welcome to a Great War Bio special about Rasputin.
Grigory Rasputin's life is difficult to document, as his tale has been warped by popular
culture, rumors, and the destruction of documentation regarding his life by the Bolsheviks.
Still, a significant amount of truth can be established by what remains, and that's
what I'll try to do today.
He was born in the small village of Pokrovskoe January 21st, 1869.
His father was a well-off peasant, but Grigory was never educated, as there was no school
in the region and the majority of the village was illiterate.
Grigory apparently underwent some sort of religious epiphany as a young man and possibly
became associated with the Khlysty religious sect.
This was a form of Orthodox Christianity that rejected the abstinent life of the priest
and the veneration of the saint; instead they believed one could experience the divinity
of God through ecstatic rituals like orgies.
Rasputin's daughter later said that he investigated the cult but rejected its values.
It's kind of open to debate.
He did marry, at age 19, Praskovia Fyodorovna, with whom he had four children.
He eventually left his family to travel, to places like Greece or Jerusalem, where he
visited holy sites.
He himself was neither a monk nor a priest, but he had a reputation as a religious wanderer,
who offered his teaching for hospitality, returning home only to help with the harvest.
In the hub city of Kazan he attracted attention from the clergy and aristocracy, who were
fascinated by his interpretations of scripture.
It is debated exactly when Rasputin met the Tsarina Alexandra.
He was already professing his abilities as a holy healer when he arrived in St. Petersburg
in 1903.
I understand that Montenegrin Princess Milica introduced him to the royal couple.
Tsar Nicholas first mentions him in his diary November 1st, 1905, simply calling him a man
of God.
The Tsarina was very religious.
She believed in the power of prayer and prayed for a cure for her son Alexei, who suffered
from hemophilia.
Willing to try virtually anything to heal the heir to the throne, she allowed Rasputin
to see him, and the result was fairly miraculous because the current bleeding spell came to
an end.
This was likely because Rasputin stopped the palace doctor from giving Alexei aspirin,
which acts as a blood thinner and was only making him worse.
But whatever it was, the Tsarina thought he was truly a miracle-working healer.
After this, Rasputin quickly climbed the social ladder in the capital and began associating
with many members of the royal family.
He also gained a reputation for sexual depravity and scandalous behavior to such a degree that
the Prime Minister even asked the Tsar why he would associate with such a character.
Alexei suffered an accident while on vacation in 1912 that led to more hemorrhaging and
it appeared he would die.
Alexandra cabled Rasputin begging for help; his reply was, "God has seen your tears
and heard your prayers, do not grieve, the little one will not die, do not allow the
doctors to bother him too much".
Yet another miracle followed as the Prince recovered and Rasputin became Alexandra's
trusted companion.
Rasputin's magnetic personality was his main attribute.
He was incredibly persuasive and when he entered a room, all eyes were on him.
He was consequently able to calm the Tsar and Tsarina in times of crisis.
Also, because of his humble origins, the Romanovs held the belief that the rest of the Russian
peasantry was as vehemently Royalist as Rasputin.
This was a mistake.
Rasputin quickly became a very controversial figure.
Aristocrats were against him because he had more access to the royal family than they,
the Orthodox Church accused him of spreading false doctrine, rumors even spread that he
was the lover of the Tsarina herself, and Rasputin was hated by both sides of the political
spectrum.
To the left he was a Tsarist and an enemy of democracy, while to the right he was a
pacifist and traitor to Russia.
He had, at the war's beginning, spoken out against Russia taking any part in it, prophesizing,
"If Russia goes to war it will be the end of the monarchy, of the Romanovs, and of Russian
institutions".
By the summer of 1915, his hold over the royal couple was deep and he often advised them.
Most of his influence over events in Russia, though, came after the Tsar dismissed Grand
Duke Nikolai and took personal control of the army in September 1915.
It's suggested that this actually happened because Rasputin persuaded the Tsarina to
persuade the Tsar to dismiss Nikolai, who hated Rasputin and saw him for what he was.
With the departure of the Tsar for the front, Rasputin's influence over royal affairs
grew dramatically.
The Tsarina soon had to deal with a mass political revolt from the council of ministers.
Because of labor strikes and social unrest in the cities, the ministers pleaded for a
new ministry of competent officials that had the support of the people.
Alexandra saw this as total disrespect and asked her husband to stand his ground.
He did, and surprised the ministers by dissolving the Duma and returning to autocratic rule.
Several ministers were dismissed.
Alexandra had arranged those dismissals, but they were recommended by Rasputin, who used
the chaos to have opponents and critics removed from power.
Indeed, over the following months, several ministers were replaced by men loyal to Rasputin.
With him ensconced as the power behind the throne, good government sort of stopped happening
because without his patronage you couldn't remain in office very long, and many of those
that were loyal to him and the Tsarina were pretty incompetent.
Prime Minister Boris Stürmer was one of those.
I talk about him in the regular episodes, but he sometimes refused even to act without
consulting Rasputin or Alexandra, and his German name, the Tsar's family ties to the
Kaiser, and the fact that Alexandra was born German stoked a wave of anti-German hatred
for the royals.
The constant changing of ministers had also broken down most government organization and
there were food shortages and rampant inflation.
And Rasputin's pal Protopopov, the deeply unpopular Minister of the Interior, wished
to turn all the public discontent into a revolution for the purposes of putting it down, to get
Russia out of the war.
By the end of 1916, there were even several coup plots to remove the Tsar from power.
None got off the ground because of poor organization or cold feet, but one plot did succeed; the
murder of Rasputin by Prince Felix Yusupov, though the facts surrounding his death are
still disputed today.
Yusupov originally claimed his motive for the killing was patriotism for the monarchy
that Rasputin was destroying, but later said it was his distaste for Rasputin's debauchery.
Whatever the case, he posed as his own wife and invited Rasputin to his house.
The room for the murder was as soundproofed as possible and Yusupov's memoirs say that
he offered Rasputin cakes laced with cyanide, but Rasputin didn't eat them.
So Felix shot him, piercing his liver and stomach, but that didn't kill Rasputin,
who wisely made tracks.
He made it out of the palace, but was shot in the spine in the courtyard, killing him.
One of Yusupov's co-conspirators then shot him through the head.
Actually, some sources say that it was Grand Duke Dmitri who did the whole killing beginning
to end.
Anyhow, not being experts in murder, they then made blunder after blunder.
They wrapped his body in broadcloth and dumped it off a bridge through a gap in the ice into
the Malaya Nevka River.
They didn't weigh him down though, so he didn't sink, and anyhow one of his boots
fell off and was stuck in the struts of the bridge.
Also, policemen had heard the gunfire, but they couldn't really investigate because
of Yusupov's rank.
Long story short, Rasputin's body was soon found.
But if the murder was carried out to protect improve the image of the Tsar, it backfired.
Once Rasputin was gone, more and more people realized that he hadn't been the problem,
the problem was perhaps the Tsar itself.
Well, Rasputin had done well for himself, no question, considering his origins, but
his legacy was to divide the Russian aristocracy from the royal family, and to make the Tsarist
regime appear to the people to be corrupt and decadent, and by the time of his death,
it was only a matter of time before public resentment for the monarchy, which Rasputin
and the Tsarina had done much to foster, spilled out like so much gasoline waiting
to be ignited.
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