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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.50: The Holy Man

Last time we talked about the tsarevich, his hemophilia and the effect it had on his parents and sisters. Because all through the tumults of the Revolution of 1905, it’s aftermath, and the reactionary turn that followed, the family labored under emotional stress that does not excuse or even fully explain their behavior, but does add a necessary dimension to the story. And I didn’t mention this last week, but there is a kind of parallel to what happened with Louis the 16th and Marie Antoinette in the late 1780s. They too went years without producing a male heir and endured the stress and toll of not having secured the dynasty, and then when a baby boy finally came along, he was constantly sick. In his case, not hemophilia, but tuberculosis. And then the beloved crown prince and heir to the throne entered his final illness and died in June, 1789, like right in the middle of the crisis of the Estates-General. Now things like this, don’t explain everything, but they do matter.

But the tsarevich did not die. Despite many scary moments, he kept living, he kept surviving. And the need to explain this survival with some kind of cause and effect mechanism led particularly Alexandra further down the road towards mystic religiosity. Now she was always devoutly religious, but after the birth of her son, she became more devout than ever. And this is important, not just on a personal level, but on a political and social level, especially in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1905, because Nicholas and Alexandra fervently believed in god, in divinity, in divine agency, working in the world and responsive to prayer. This tied directly into the health, not just of their family, but of the empire, which they continued to believe had been given to Nicholas by god. Their reactionary conservatism, the fight to undo 1905 and reclaim their rightful authority, was not just about jealously guarding worldly power, but about defending divinity from blasphemy. Their calculations were not just political but religious. They paid as much heed, and then maybe more than they should have, to religious and spiritual advisors as government ministers and political advisors. The deep interwoven connection between religion, politics, and family life all came to be embodied by one man in particular, who has become the archetype of the hypnotically manipulative spiritual advisor: Grigori Rasputin.

Much has been made of Rasputin. Much has been said of Rasputin. He has been an infamous figure for more than a century, and it’s a very tricky thing to disentangle truth from myth, from Rasputin, this guy who was born in Siberia and was later kicking around the imperial palace, like a member of the family saying and doing specific things, from the Rasputin who was a socially constructed idea, conjured from the imaginations of both admirers and detractors. Because both friends and enemies were prone to exaggeration, heaping onto Rasputin anecdotes and stories and accusations, whether to praise him or damn him to say he was a blessing miracle worker or a sinister and abusive charlatan. And this remains a challenge because stories picked up in the press or spread around society gossip was later treated as primary source material by future historians and biographers who passed along these quote unquote firsthand accounts that were in reality just people jotting down rumors they heard in a salon, or stories deliberately manufactured to make Rasputin look either really good or really bad.

So, what I’m relying on here is a recent biography of Rasputin by Douglas Smith, which is a gargantuan biography that came out a few years ago, and which has done an admirable job of just starting from square one to take stock of what we know, what we don’t know, what was true, and what was false. Because not everything you know about Rasputin is true, but also, not everything you know about Rasputin is false.

So, first things first, pretty much everything you may have heard about Rasputin before the age of 30 has no basis in actual concrete contemporaneous evidence. Any specific anecdote about him doing this or doing that invariably comes from a much later period, either supplied by Rasputin in interviews and conversations, or supplied by his enemies, taking what they believed about him in, say, 1912 or 1913, and then telling stories about what he must have been like in, say, 1890. But none of it comes from the period itself, which is understandable. Rasputin was born an illiterate peasant among illiterate peasants, and so it’s not exactly a shock that there was almost no documentation about his early life.

The gist of what we do know is that he was born in a small Siberian village in January 1869, and was the only surviving child of his parents. His father at some point worked in the imperial mail service as a driver, and probably Rasputin did spend most of his life kinda up to no good. There appears to be at least a few notes of arrest from local police that speak to a mischievous bordering on criminal personality. Now, oddly enough, both Rasputin’s enemies and his friends have an interest in exaggerating and inventing stories about his youthful deviancy. His enemies obviously want to make him look bad. But because in the future, Rasputin will effectively be telling a story of how he’s born again Christian, though not in that precise language at all, it’s important to establish how sinful he was in order to emphasize the power of the transformation wrought by God. That is how those born again. Stories work. There is no redemption without sin.

In 1897, Rasputin was 28 years old, he was married with a few children, and still living in the household of his parents when he suddenly got it into his head to change his life completely. He was now going to seek the path of a godly pilgrim, become a monk or a holy man. And apparently Rasputin just sort of announced one day that he was off to find god, and went off to find god. Now, obviously something pushed him down that path, but it’s hard to say what, whether it was some transcendent mystical experience or something more mundane, like looking down at his plow one day and was like, man, hard work sucks, I’m out of here. Now, the decision to go off and find god was not unheard of, and wandering religious pilgrims were a well-known part of life in the Russian Empire. So Rasputin is not just being some lone weirdo here, he is joining a very active and well-populated milieu. He went first to a monastery where he probably learned to read and write, and then spent a few years on the pilgrimage circuit of Orthodox Christianity, probably making it as far as Mount Athos in Greece, and then he would periodically return home, hang out for a little bit before leaving to go on another pilgrimage.

While back in his home village, he developed a small circle of friends and acolytes who joined him for their own brand of Christian worship. Now he was suspected at the time, and it still sometimes connected to this day, with a particular underground sect of heretics who were into sadomasochistic orgies as the true path to god, but it does not appear that investigations of Rasputin by the church or the state ever established a real link.

In 1904, so like seven years after he decided to become a man of god, Rasputin moved from the pilgrimage circuit to big city society. First, he went to the city of Kazan on the banks of the Volga, and there met and ingratiated himself with local church officials and an influential monastery. These guys sized him up, believed Rasputin to be a sincere men of god, and gave him their blessing to operate as a quasi-mystical holy man healer and seer. Now this role too, was an established part of Russian life. They were called starets, spiritual advisors, teachers, and soothsayers, dispensing advice based on their own mysterious connection to god.

After spending a while in Kazan, Rasputin acquired a handful of letters of recommendation from influential people in the church and society, and carried those to St. Petersburg. He came to the capital probably in the summer of 1905, which, let’s be very clear, we’re right smack dab in the middle of the revolution of 1905 here, but when he arrived, he met and impressed two gatekeepers into St. Petersburg society. The first was an influential theologian named Theophan. The other were the two so-called Black Princesses, the Montenegro borne wives of two of the tsar’s cousins, who were influential patrons and salon keepers in St. Petersburg. With friends and supporters now established in both the church and in society, the doors of St. Petersburg were opened to Rasputin.

Now, it might seem strange that this rough semi-literate peasant could so easily win his way into high society. But at this moment in history, Russian high society was very disconnected from the traditional hierarchy of the Orthodox Church, which was mostly meant for the peasants. Instead, they were super into spiritualism, mysticism, and the occult. This is just a part of a whole global trend in the late 19th and early 20th century, this is the heyday of theosophy and seances and paranormal belef. Rasputin fit right into the expected mold of an exotic mystical shaman from the wilderness who might possess second sight and clairvoyance and magical healing abilities, and his very uncouth peasant habits only added to a kind of repellent allure that he carried around with him.

But Rasputin was singularly successful in this scene because of his undeniably magnetic personal charisma, which everyone talks about, friend and foe alike. And in particular, they talked about his eyes. That his eyes had this deep penetrating, and unsettling intensity, that he would look right at you, fix his eyes on you, and you just sort of feel seen. This is not necessarily out and out hypnosis, but the intensity of Rasputin penetrating gaze was universally remarked upon. And he paired this penetrating gaze with a habit of affecting an unashamed egalitarian manner with whoever he happened to be talking to, no matter how great or small. And he would ask these incredibly direct and personal questions, right: how’s your marriage? Are you happy? Do your children love you? Stuff like that, stuff that was practically unheard of in high society and made people both uncomfortable and vulnerable. And this was the key to Rasputin’s social success, and the key to his ability to manipulate people. Rasputin was a master of social manipulation, and as we’ll talk about next week, he was well aware of the power he was able to wield over people, especially women. And he already knew how to get what he wanted, whatever that might be..

So, the reputation of this intense peasant holy man touched by god who could maybe see the future and maybe heal the sick just by touch and prayer spread throughout St. Petersburg society, and Rasputin became a not to be missed curiosity. Eventually, word reached the imperial palace through multiple channels, but most especially the Black Princesses, who encouraged Nicholas and Alexandra to just, get a load of this guy. And they did. On November the first, 1905 — so again, we’re talking just a few weeks after the Tsar signed the October Manifesto admitting defeat in the Revolution of 1905 — Rasputin was invited to the Imperial Palace. Nicholas jotted down the meeting in his diary, this marking the first contact between Rasputin and the Romanoffs. Rasputin made a favorable impression on the imperial couple, especially as he seemed to be the living embodiment of everything Nicholas and Alexandra wanted to believe about the empire: he was this simple peasant touched by god who loved and supported the tsar. He was everything they wanted from the Russian people, he called them mother and father, and told them do not worry, all will be well. It was exactly what they wanted to hear, and as the months and years went on, they were happy to invite Rasputin around to tell them more of exactly what they wanted to hear.

Now, because I am scheduled for surgery in… I’m looking at the clock right now, in about 18 hours from now, we’re going to leave it there and we’ll pick it up next week, as Rasputin becomes an increasingly regular presence at the Imperial palace. First, without incident, because he carried the recommendation of high society and the official approval of the Orthodox Church, but then with increasing tension, as his early supporters turned their backs on him, as stories about what exactly he was using his intensely manipulative powers to do, and how far into the inner sanctum of imperial authority, he might be doing them.