Grigori Efimovich Rasputin

One of Nicholas’s worst decisions was his toleration of the peasant starets Rasputin. Like Robert Lees in Queen Victoria’s court, Rasputin served Empress Alexandra as a link into the supernatural world. At the turn of the new century, all the high-born Russians of St. Petersburg were obsessed with spiritualism, be it table-rappings or seances. Holy men, or staretses, were in vogue for their ability to prophesy or make clairvoyant predictions while in the throes of religious ecstasies. Edward Radzinsky writes:

Late in 1903, Rasputin appeared in the halls of St. Petersburg Theological Academy wearing a greasy jacket, oiled boots and baggy trousers that hung down in back like a torn hammock, his beard tangled and his hair parted like a tavern waiter’s. He had hypnotic gray-blue eyes, first gentle and kind, then fierce and angry-- but usually guarded. His speech was strange, too, almost incoherent, lulling, somehow primordial (103).

Soon, throughout the capital, everyone was talking about this remarkable man. Fulop-Miller writes, “Wonderful tales were told of how the starets could look into every man’s soul, foresee the future, and heal the sick by a glance of his eyes or a touch of his hands (202.)”

Healing was what the Empress Alexandra needed most, not only for her sick son, but for herself. Already she had attempted mystical cures prescribed by a French savant, and in her court was a mysterious Tibetan physician, Dr. Badmaev. Soon Rasputin was added to her retinue. Significantly, he was introduced to the royal couple on Halloween. According to Rasputin’s daughter Maria:

My father never told me of the precise date upon which he first met the royal family, but it is likely that it occurred on October 31, 1905, for on the next day, November 1, the Tsar wrote in his diary: ‘We have met a man of God--Grigori Efimovich, from Tobolsk Province (111).’

With a forthright manner, blustery charm and hypnotic gaze, Rasputin soon became indispensable to both Nicholas and Alexandra, not only religiously and medically, but politically as well. Medically, his powers were amazing. Often he would cure the Tsarevich from hemorrhaging by telegram. Theo Aronson credits Rasputin’s healing powers to primitive psychology. For example, in the autumn of 1912, Alexi suffered a bump which resulted in internal bleeding. Days passed without an abatement in the bleeding. Finally, sacraments were given, and on that night the Empress telegraphed Rasputin for help. Rasputin telegraphed in reply, “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 (Aronson, 193).” Alexandra followed these instructions and the next day the hemorrhaging stopped. Aronson speculates:

Then Rasputin’s advice, that the doctors should cease to bother the patient, was extremely valuable. What Alexis needed to help stop the bleeding was an atmosphere of calm. This could hardly have been provided by a group of anxious and bewildered doctors. Nor could it have emanated from the desperately worried empress. But once she had been reassured by Rasputin’s message, she may, in some fashion, have transmitted her newly-found feeling of tranquility and confidence to her son. This suddenly relaxed and optimistic atmosphere, coinciding with a natural easing of the flow of blood, may well have saved Alexis’ life (193).

On the other hand, Maria Rasputin herself alludes to another, albeit cynical, explanation. She comments:
According to his [Rasputin’s] enemies in the court, the Tsarevich had been administered small doses of poison but Dr. Badmaev, Papa’s friend and (next to the Empress) chief exponent in the palace. This, they claimed, was the cause of Alexi’s illness. Then, they implausibly suggest, Dr. Badmaev had left off the dosage when the Tsarina sent her telegram to Papa, thus permitting normal recovery (178).

At this point, Dr. Badmaev deserves comment. The name Badmaev appears in several references to the Russian Imperial court. In an atmosphere replete with magicians, Dr. Badmaev, with his white smock and high white cap of a Tibetan mage, held a premier post. According to Rene Fulop-Miller, “He passed at Court for one of the last ‘wise men of the East,’ and, therefore, met with more consideration and reverence than all the other empirical miracle workers (125).” That he would know and use poisons for political purposes seems highly probable, particularly considering his mysterious laboratory. Again, Fulop-Miller writes:

Only the master himself had the entry to it and there, in complete seclusion, with the aid of magic crucibles and mysterious formulae, he prepared his various alchemic remedies, infusion of asoka flowers, nivrik powder, Nienchen balsam, black lotus essence , and Tibetan elixir of life. He had established a whole pharmacopoeia of his own of drugs, tinctures, and mixtures with mysterious, magical labels that were supposed to indicate the methods of preparation to the initiated; but only the master himself was able to interpret the labels, and the invaders who took possession of his lab after the Revolution found themselves confronted with a chaos of incomprehensible names, perplexing memoranda, and useless apparatus to which they lacked any key (127).

Whether Badmaev was a charlatan or a genius or both, he represents the talent that surrounded Nicholas and Alexandra. His presence explains a great deal about Rasputin’s strange credibility with the royal couple. Although Nicholas and Alexandra knew the rumors of their friend’s drinking and carousing with Gypsies, both tolerated his presumptuous behavior and uncouth remarks in their presence. Rather than such contradictions causing suspicion, his grossness only confirmed to them his spirituality. As Rasputin’s daughter Maria explained in her memoirs:

I knew that he was in almost constant pain from the knife wound he had sustained during an attempt on his life, and I knew that at times his pain was more than he could bear. At such times he would run out of the house and stay away until dawn, when he would return home. It was not until later that I learned he had spent the hours drinking and dancing with the Gypsies at the Villa Rodye as the only surcease from the ache in his abdomen (9).

This explanation of her father’s behavior is not as convenient as it might seem. Rasputin belonged to a charismatic cult of worship called Khlysty, in which the Holy Spirit would be called down from heaven through orgiastic dancing and singing. Rasputin was converted, and subsequently rose to prominence, through these religious experiences. In fact, he was rumored during his life to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. Fulop-Miller writes, “Men and women of all ages and classes, princesses as well as their maid servants, went to Father Grigori and thrilled in expectation of the solemn moment when they should be allowed to kneel and beg for the blessing of God who had once again become man (203).” Even as late as 1977, Patte Barham discovered a Rasputin cult in Paris in which worshippers kept as a relic their master’s severed phallus. Barham describes the reliquary as “a polished wooden box . . . eighteen inches long, and six wide, with an inlaid silver crest on the top . . . I saw what looked like a blackened, over ripe banana, about a foot long, and resting on velvet . . . ‘It is the Holy Father’s sexual organ,’ she was told (258-259).”

Certainly the way Rasputin died would encourage belief in his superhuman vitality. Like Christ, Rasputin was lured into danger under the cover of darkness and betrayed by a disciple. The Judas in this case was the degenerate young Prince Yussoporov. Whether out of patriotism, amoral anomie, or homosexual frustration, the Russian nobleman and several select conspirators held a last supper for Rasputin in which they plied him with s and wine laced with cyanide, all while Yussoporov played sad Gypsy songs on his guitar. When Rasputin refused to die, they nervously overplayed their hand and shot him with a revolver, then knifed him, kicked him, clubbed him and, finally, stuffed him through a hole in the ice of the frozen River Neva. Rasputin still refused to die! Aronson writes, “But, incredibly, Rasputin was not yet dead. When his corpse was brought up three days later, it was discovered that he had still had enough strength to free one of his roped hands and that he had actually died from drowning (221).”

Shortly after Rasputin’s death, the Revolution swept Russia and the Tsar and his entire family were executed. Rasputin had foreseen it all, including his own death in the river. According to Fulop-Miller, when the royal family passed Rasputin’s village, the Empress remembered a strange prophesy he made: “I see many tortured creatures, whole masses of people, great heaps, crowds of bodies! Among them are many grand dukes and hundreds of counts. The Neva will be red with blood (372).”