This week’s episode is brought to you by audible. Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment. All in one place at audible, you can find the largest selections of audio books. Ranging from best-sellers and new releases to celebrity, memoirs, languages, business motivation, and more like original entertainment from top celebrity creators in thousands of popular and binge-worthy podcasts.

So we’re finishing up with Rasputin today, but if you want to learn way, way, way more, I recommend Rasputin faith power and the Twilight of the czars by Douglas Smith, which was my main source for most of the stuff. He covers pretty much everything you would want to know about Rasputin and more. I mean, it’s 33 hours long, so don’t expect to walk away feeling like something got skipped or skimmed over because trust me nothing was skipped or skimmed over as an audible member, you will get one credit every month.

Good for any title in their entire premium selection. That means the latest best sellers are the busiest new releases. And those titles are going to be yours to keep forever in your audible library. So to start your membership, visit audible.com/revolutions or text revolutions to 500, 500. That again.

Visit audible.com/revolutions or text revolutions to 500, 500.

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10:51: Our Friend

Welcome to the third installment of what was supposed to be a single episode about Rasputin and his relationship with the imperial family, but which became three mini-episodes thanks to my recent health adventures. Um, as I wrote this episode, I was propped up in bed, in between kidney stone procedures. The next one is scheduled for this coming Friday, April 16th, after which we almost immediately hop on a plane and fly home on Sunday, April 18. So, there will be an episode that drops that day on Sunday, April 18th, but it will have nothing to do with the Russian Revolution. Instead, it’ll be a little standalone reflection called The Streets of Paris, a few episodic slices of life from living here between 2018 and 2021 that connect back to scenes from our previous series on the various French revolutions, right, what it was like to be in the middle of Parisian streets, crammed with angry protestors, or streets crammed with jubilant crowds, or streets as empty and silent as a post-apocalyptic fantasy. After that, I will take two weeks off to adjust to moving back to the United States, and then we’ll come back to the launch World War I.

So last week we got as far as Rasputin’s first introduction to the imperial family in November 1905, Nicholas and Alexander took a shine to the peasant holy man, but it’s not like he immediately moved into the palace. Over the course of the next several years, he regularly bounced back and forth between St. Petersburg and his home village in Siberia, developing and cultivating his reputation on both sides of the Ural mountains. So after the first meeting between Rasputin and the imperial family in late 1905, he did not actually see them again until July 1906, and then after that, not again until October 1906. Now in between this, he sent various letters and salutations and they came to think rather highly of him, but his movement into the inner circle was slow and steady, not sudden and all at once.

Rasputin really started becoming a recognizable fixture in the imperial circle in the spring of 1907, not just in St. Petersburg high society, but out on the outskirts of town, in the imperial residence at Tsarskoye Selo. In particular, he won over a young woman named Anna Vyrubova, who had become an intimate personal friend of Alexandra. About a decade younger than the empress, Anna served as a close friend and protege and devoutly loyal supporter. She was invited to take up residence in a home adjacent to the main imperial palace and very much inside the imperial bubble. An unhappy marriage to an unhappy husband led Anna to seek spiritual solace with the apparently holy Rasputin, and she became one of his most fervent supporters in the inner circle. Many of the meetings between Rasputin and Nicholas and Alexandra physically took place inside Anna’s house.

Rasputin was successful enough at conquering St. Petersburg high society and earning special attention and favors from the imperial family that by the fall of 1907, he was able to buy a fine two story house on the main street of his home village. He was fast transitioning from charismatic, eccentric to well-connected figure with powerful friends and allies. On this particular trip home in the fall of 1907, Rasputin also arrived with four devoutly loyal female supporters who all took up residence with him and Rasputin’s wife and children. This led to much speculation and gossip about his relationship with these women. Rasputin had a well-documented habit of publicly hugging and kissing women in ways that were well outside what would be considered decent. He was also known to regularly take mixed gender trips to the bath, which was considered irregular and indecent. Local complaints led local church authorities to investigate them and interview everyone in Rasputin’s little circle over the winter of 1907-1908, which concluded that he was sitting right on the line. He wasn’t necessarily a heretic and hadn’t done anything illegal, but he was probably up to no good.

Local concern out on the far flung periphery of the empire was matched by concern in the inner circle of the empire. When Rasputin was in St. Petersburg, he made increasingly familiar calls on the imperial family, who now welcomed him with eager and open arms. The tsar’s sister Olga was shocked to discover Rasputin was allowed to linger in the family’s private chambers even after the children had changed into their nightgowns. Right around this same time, Olga found herself alone with Rasputin at a little evening soiree and was extremely put off by his advances. He moved over to her real close and started caressing her while they talked, causing her to get up and leave the room.

But though Olga was disturbed by Rasputin’s behavior, shortly after these incidents, the then three-year-old Aleksei fell and hurt his leg, causing all kinds of painful internal bleeding. The doctors could do nothing, but the family called Rasputin and he came over and he prayed over the toddler and in the morning, Aleksei was better. Olga found Rasputin personally distasteful, but after this was convinced that he had some kind of healing ability that could not be denied, and it was this place, as the comforter and healer of the tsarevitch that Rasputin’s place became secure practically no matter what he did or what stories were told about him.

So we should talk about this for a second, because if you are disinclined to believe Rasputin had the ability to literally ask God to heal the sick and God listened, we do have to wonder what’s going on here. Now, Robert Massey’s biography of Nicholas and Alexander spent a lot of time on this question, and the basic takeaway is that a hemophiliac recovering from an incident requires an environment of peace, calm and serenity. You got to eliminate physical jostling and emotional stress to allow extremely tentative and fragile blood clots to form. Now both Rasputin skeptics and his supporters all report that the family believed in him enough that his prayers and his presence created that environment. It also led them to have faith in recovery outside the ministrations of the doctors, which just so happened to be full of exactly the kind of poking and prodding that disrupted the healing process. So again, if you are disinclined to believe a religious explanation, what you might say is that Rasputin showed up and allowed this tsarevitch’s body to heal itself. But Rasputin did provide a kind of faith that allowed Aleksei’s body to accomplish the work it needed to accomplish. There is also some evidence that he intervened to prevent the administration of aspirin as a pain reliever, which thins the blood and was doing far more harm than good. But whatever the explicit mix of factors, Nicholas and especially Alexandra became convinced Rasputin could relieve their little son’s misery, and thus their own misery. And even a skeptic like Olga, who did not like Rasputin personally, could not deny the apparently miraculous results he achieved.

Outside the inner circle though, Rasputin ingratiating himself with the imperial family was a cause for concern. Plenty of people believed he was just a smooth talking charlatan whose ultimate intentions were not known. I mean, we can’t forget that this is all taking place against a backdrop of massive social revolution. Rasputin was an unknown and potentially destabilizing element and maybe even some kind of deep cover subversive revolutionary himself. It shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that the Okhrana opened a file on him and kept him under near constant surveillance and shared their findings with prime Minister Stolypin. Their basic conclusion was that Rasputin was a womanizing con artist who should be kept as far away from the tsar as possible. Stolypin took this assessment to Nicholas who promised to never see Rasputin again, but who then just kept right on seeing Rasputin. In any fight between Stolypin and Rasputin for the ear of the tsar, Rasputin was always going to win, because he was happy to tell Nicholas what he wanted to hear, and Stolypin was always telling the tsar things he didn’t want to hear.

Now this set the pattern for the next several years: Nicholas and Alexander ever defending Rasputin, and often referring to him simply as “our friend” from enemies and slanderers who wanted to destroy him for their own sinister reasons. Outside the imperial bubble, their support for him was inexplicable, because even well-connected people did not understand the true nature of Aleksei’s hemophilia. and so they chalked it all up to Rasputin’s manipulative hypnosis or the carnal lusts of the empress. The Tsar’s personal valet routinely fed information to the gossipy salons of high society that Rasputin was around all the time, coming in through the back door, that he was often alone with the empress and overly familiar with the children. It led to widespread rumors of affairs, and worse.

The and worse really started coalescing in 1909, as early supporters in society and in the church grew disenchanted with Rasputin and turned on him. The manipulative way he treated vulnerable women, the overly physical way he pawed at everyone in sight led to stories of orgies and debauchery, and then, inevitably, extremely credible accusations of rape.

The rape accusations came from, among other places, a nun at a convent he visited, two of his early young female admirers, another from the personal governess of the tsarevich. From the distance of a hundred years, the limited amount of evidence available, and the filter of Rasputin’s many enemies, makes it hard to say which of these allegations are true, and which were invented. But after everything that I have read, I am more than comfortable saying the following: one, rasputin was a casual sex pest. He was a creep; two, he took sexual advantage of vulnerable young women; and three, he raped at least several women. So even after clearing out all the obvious fabrications and exaggerations and lies, what we’re left with is more than enough to conclude that Rasputin was guilty many times over of sexual assault and rape.

The stories of his immoral behavior and the various rape allegations against him became well-known in society by 1909 and 1910, and they were a huge part of the reason his early supporters inside of the church turned on him. But Alexandra refused to believe any of it. She dismissed all of it as lies and slanders against our friend, who was a man of deep and loving faith, nothing more. People just didn’t understand him because they could not understand someone who was touched by God. And Rasputin was smart enough to frame all of this as a battle between god and the devil, where he was god, and the minions of the devil were out to get him. The imperial family were already in a state of siege politically, and this became just one more facet of that siege mentality, that demons and Jews and atheists were trying to destroy all that was good and holy on earth.

The connection between this personal sense of siege and the political sense of siege met in the spring of 1910 as the free press finally got ahold of the story that this guy Rasputin was hanging around the imperial family and probably doing horrible things. The Moscow Gazette printed a series of salacious articles describing all manner of Rasputin’s debauchery. When the tsar called in Stolypin to address this PR crisis, it was not, let’s figure out what to do with Rasputin, it was, how do we shut down the free press? Stolypin said, they’re not printing anything illegal so I can’t really arrest anybody or shut down any newspapers, but the tsar still ordered him to lean on editors and newspapers to stop talking about his friend, and Stolypin carried out his orders, and leaned on editors to stop talking about it.

But even after trying to shut down the public debate about Rasputin, Stolypin still tried personally to get rid of him. In February 1911, he called Rasputin in for a personal meeting and presented a damning dossier describing Rasputin’s known activities all from various eyewitness statements and suggested Rasputin leave St. Petersburg and never come back.

Now Rasputin did decide that this was coincidentally a good time to suddenly make a prolonged pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but not before indicating to Alexandra that Stolypin was out to get him, which only helped turn the empress against the prime minister rather than open her eyes to what Rasputin was up to. Stolypin’s falling out with the imperial family and his subsequently unmourned assassination was at least partly due to his hostility to Rasputin.

Rasputin, of course, outlasted Stolypin, and he weathered this initial public storm set against him, but then a truly miraculous incident in 1912 basically foreclosed anyone’s ability to purge him from the imperial bubble. While the imperial family was on vacation in the fall of 1912, eight year old Aleksei fell getting into a boat and injured his leg. But luckily, it didn’t seem so bad at first. But then a few weeks later, the family was out at a Polish hunting lodge, and Alexandra and Aleksei went for a carriage ride. The jostling aggravated the previous injury and he started complaining of pain in his groin and his abdomen. When they got home, he immediately went to bed, and it quickly became the worst and most life-threatening episode of his young life.

He didn’t get better. Doctors raced from St. Petersburg to the tsarevitch as he only got worse and never better. Alexandra maintained a nearly sleepless vigil for a week and a half, while Nicholas maintained the pretense that all was fine and well for the throngs of visitors and attendants who were present at the lodge, all of the wild Aleksei lay in his bed in continuous pain. And the descriptions of this are heartwrenching: he was asking his mother, why don’t you help me, he was asking her if the pain would stop if he died. And pretty soon everyone, the boy included, believed he was dying.

Eventually word started leaking and the public was notified that the tsarevitch was gravely ill. There were public vigils and prayers. On the 10th day after taking to his bed, he seemed to be slipping. They gave him his last rites. And on this last night, Alexandra asked her friend Anna to contact Rasputin over telegraph. He cabled back almost immediately: “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” he said, “Do not be sad. The little boy will not die. Do not let the doctors torment him too much.”

Alexandra was relieved to hear this. And the next day, Aleksei woke up alive. And then slowly, miraculously, and unaccountably, started getting better. Whether it was coincidence or the soothing comfort of being promised that all would be well, or whether the empress insisted the doctors leave her son alone and that did the trick, there seemed to be some kind of causal link between Rasputin’s cable and the recovery. At least in Alexandra’s mind. Alekesi did recover. He did not die. And Rasputin’s place at the side of the imperial family was secure. He would be right there to comfort and guide them and soothe them as they entered into a national crisis that made the Revolution of 1905 look like child’s play: World War I.