Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs
by douglas smith
farrar, straus and giroux, 848 pages, $35

The Okhrana, the czar’s secret police, gave him the code name “the Dark One”—not only because he was mysterious, but also because his influence on Russia was so baleful. Except for Emperor Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra themselves, no one did more to discredit the Romanov dynasty than Grigory Rasputin.

Consequently, it was the monarchists—not the radicals and not the outraged husbands of the countless women he seduced—who organized the sensational murder that has fascinated readers ever since. Rasputin insisted that if he died, the monarchy would soon perish, and less than three months after his assassination, Nicholas abdicated. Within another year, the royal family would be murdered in circumstances eerily similar to those in which their “Friend,” as they called Rasputin, had met his end.

Who was Rasputin, and what exactly did he do? When Douglas Smith began his thrilling biography, based on documents newly available since the fall of the Soviet Union, he first tried to ascertain the real story, apart from the countless myths accumulated in Rasputin’s lifetime and after. Smith soon realized that what people believed was, if anything, more important than the facts. So he does his best to give us both fact and fiction, insofar as it is possible to tell the difference.

Certainly Nicholas and Alexandra revered and loved Rasputin. A Siberian peasant who abandoned his home for religious pilgrimages, he impressed many with his charisma and holiness, eventually finding his way to Petersburg. There nobility and royalty lived in a pseudo-religious ferment, enchanted in turn by necromancy, Dionysianism, theosophy, spiritualism, and countless other profound or crackpot movements. The “black sisters,” Montenegrin princesses who married into the Romanov family, introduced Rasputin to the czar and czaritsa. They still missed an earlier “friend,” the French adventurer called Monsieur Philippe, who purported to cure people with “psychic fluids and astral forces.” Philippe had predicted that someday another “friend” would provide spiritual comfort, and Rasputin fit the bill.

From the start, Rasputin advised the emperor on domestic and foreign policy. If you wanted to become a minister, or have one dismissed, you went through Rasputin. During one period of “ministerial leapfrog,” between June and November 1915, eight ministers, as well as key figures in the Church and army, were replaced, and even that pace was surpassed in the regime’s final months.

The press attributed every decision to Rasputin. Whatever you thought evil was, Rasputin embodied it. Russians have a mania for conspiracy theories, and so Rasputin was described as a German spy, a British agent, and a witting or unwitting tool of Jews intent on destroying Holy Russia and, indeed, Christianity itself. It was said (of course) that Rasputin was the empress’s lover and the real father of Alexei, the hemophiliac heir to the throne.

His enemies were right that Rasputin was some sort of sex maniac, and much was made of the fact that the name Rasputin sounds as if it were derived from the verb rasputnichat’, to engage in debauchery. His hypnotic gaze was said to drive women, especially noble women, into hysterics and deprive them of their will. At salons he would pick out women, take them into a back room, and make noisy love. His long-suffering wife never protested, explaining that “he can do what he wants, he’s got enough in him for everyone.” The most lurid tales were told of Rasputin’s mystically priapic penis, which is supposedly preserved somewhere in formaldehyde. Some noble women literally worshipped him, even keeping his dirty undergarments as relics. At least one regarded him as God incarnate. “You are God!” she screamed at him, as he beat her and replied, “And you’re a b——!”

His enemies claimed he belonged to the sect called khlysty (whips). Peasant Russia was rife with heretical sects. There were beguny (runners), who renounced money, books, family, the state, and their own names, as well as “jumpers,” “spirit-wrestlers,” and the famous “skoptsy,” or castrators, who not only castrated men but also cut off women’s breasts. In sheer numbers, the khlysty dwarfed all others. Whirling themselves until they experienced hallucinations, they supposedly practiced group sex, self-mutilation, flagellation, and cannibalism. One khlyst prophet insisted that it was not he, but God acting through him, that committed sexual improprieties. Another sectarian voiced the credo later attributed to Rasputin: “Without sin, there is no repentance, without repentance no salvation. There will be many sinners in heaven.”

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