Andrew Cook - To Kill Rasputin

Stories also abound concerning Grigori’s supposed ability to discover missing objects. On one occasion, a horse was stolen. A village meeting was called to discuss the theft. Grigori pointed at one of the richest peasants in the village and declared him the guilty man. Despite his protests, a posse of villagers followed the man back to his homestead and discovered the stolen horse there. As a result, the man was given a traditional Siberian beating.

Rasputin’s daughter Maria later wrote that he could also predict the deaths of villagers and the coming of strangers to Pokrovskoe. 20Much of what Maria was to record in her book and published interviews is, however, very much open to question. For example, the Provisional Government Inquiry of 1917 found Pokrovskoe witnesses who had a somewhat different perspective on her father. ‘They note that Efim Rasputin drank vodka heavily,’ the investigator wrote. ‘As a boy Rasputin was always dirty and untidy so that boys of his age called him a “snotter.”’ 21

Maria’s claims concerning her father’s early life are typical of the retrospective accounts that have come to be accepted without question by many subsequent writers and researchers. It suited Rasputin’s retrospective image to establish that his gifts were evident during childhood. A number of Maria’s claims are very much open to question and are at variance with testimonies given by Pokrovskoe villagers.

In August 1877, when Grigori was eight years old, his ten-year-old brother Mischa died. The two brothers were swimming in the River Toura when Mischa was caught by a current, dragging Grigori with him. Although the two boys were pulled out by a farmer, Mischa contracted pneumonia and died shortly after.

At the age of nineteen, Grigori attended a festival at Abalatski Monastery, where he met a girl two years older than himself, named Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina, from the nearby village of Dubrovnoye. Following a six-month courtship, they married. The precise date of their marriage is unknown, although the 1917 investigation believes it was 1889. 22

Marriage seems to have had little impact on Grigori or his lifestyle. He continued to spend his evenings at the tavern. According to E.I. Kartavtsev, a neighbour of the Rasputins in Pokrovskoe, who was sixty-seven years old at the time of the 1917 investigation, he had ‘caught Grigori stealing my fence poles’. 23Kartavtsev went on to explain that,

he had cut them up and put them in his cart and was about to drive off when I caught him in the act. I demanded that Grigori take them to the Constable, and when he refused and made to strike me with an axe, I, in my turn, hit him with a perch so hard that blood ran out of his nose and his mouth in a stream and he fell to the ground unconscious. At first I thought I’d killed him. When he started to move I made him come to take him to the Constable. Rasputin did not feel like going, but I hit him several times with a fist in the face, after which he went to the Constable voluntarily.

Not long after this event, Kartavtsev recalled that a pair of his horses was stolen from his meadow. ‘On the night of the theft I guarded the horses myself… I saw that Rasputin approached them with his pals, Konstantin and Trofim, but I didn’t think much of it until a few hours later I discovered the horses were not there. Right after that I went home to check whether Rasputin was in. He was there the following day, but his pals had gone.’ 24

As a result of the thefts of the poles and the horses, the Pokrovskoe villagers convened to discuss what should be done about Rasputin and his errant ways. Konstantin and Trofim were expelled from the village for horse-stealing. Rasputin was not, but he faced charges of stealing the poles and a consignment of furs in the local court. He was also accused of stealing a consignment of furs that went missing from a cart he was driving to Tyumen. In his defence, he claimed that he had been attacked by robbers.

According to his daughter Maria, he denied being a thief, and maintained that since he was convinced that other people shared his second sight, and so could track down any stolen object, he could never bring himself to steal. 25Whatever the reality, Rasputin left the village for Verkhoturye Monastery, some 250 miles north-west of Pokrovskoe, shortly afterwards.

Maria asserted that his departure from the village was the result of giving a ride to a young divinity student in his cart, who apparently encouraged Grigori to go to the monastery. 26Many years later Rasputin told a similar story to the Tsar and Tsarina. According to the imperial tutor, Gilliard, Rasputin had been hired to drive a priest to the monastery. During the journey the priest implored Grigori to confess his sins and urged him to devote himself to God. ‘These persuasions,’ said Gilliard, ‘impressed Grigori so much that he was filled with a wish to abandon his dark and desolate life.’ 27

The reality behind Rasputin’s timely departure from Pokrovskoe seems to have had little to do with such fantasies. Numerous witnesses told the 1917 Inquiry that Rasputin’s involvement in local criminality was now such that he thought it best to make an exit, preferring Verkhoturye Monastery to a criminal record and a custodial sentence.

Rasputin’s three-month stay at the monastery, according to the 1917 investigation, ended ‘the first, early, wild, loose period of his life’. As a result, ‘Rasputin was to become a different person’. 28It left anguish in his soul ‘…in the form of extreme nervousness, constant restless, jerky movements, incoherent speech, the permanent interchange of extreme nervous agitation and subsequent depression’. 29

When Rasputin came home he continued to express his delight in the natural world, which had impressed him deeply. He had given up meat and sugar and alcohol. He seemed to be in a state of ecstatic mysticism a lot of the time, but the people of Pokrovskoe snorted at his praying and his visions. He was the same old lying Grisha, as far as they could see.

Rasputin ignored them. Around the age of thirty, wild-eyed and unwashed, shouting and waving as he travelled, and sleepless for nights on end every spring, he was an eccentric figure who vaguely represented the Old Beliefs, the ancient Christian culture of ‘Holy Rus’ whose sorcerers, healers and false messiahs attracted many followers. In particular he headed north and west to the large monastery at Verkhoturye in the Urals, where he worshipped at the shrine of St Simeon of Verkhoturye. This St Simeon had died of fasting and self-neglect early in the seventeenth century, but Rasputin looked upon his spirit as his guardian and mentor.

At some time in his wanderings and contacts with the adherents of ‘Holy Rus’, Rasputin had become involved with the Khlysti. These were the followers of Daniel Filippovich, who had been crucified and resurrected more than once (a story reminiscent of Yusupov’s later account of Rasputin who, allegedly, was poisoned and shot at point-blank range and left for dead before leaping scarily to his feet half an hour later). There were several messiahs like Filippovich in the sect’s history and most of them were said to have been raised from the dead.

The Khlysti were harmless enough, but to the Orthodox mind they were the Devil incarnate. Adherents to the sect believed that repentance was insignificant unless they had something to repent for . So ‘sinning’ – fornication, and plenty of it – was a necessary preamble to repentance. Thus encouraged to indulge themselves, the Khlysti exulted in ecstatic secret meetings, with priests in nightshirts whirling like dervishes into elevated states of consciousness and behaving ‘sinfully’ with their attendant womenfolk before prophesying, praying and repenting. 30Rasputin’s gift of prophecy seemed particularly significant to his followers; he had a ‘sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom’. 31But none of this must be divulged… Orthodox priests were appalled when in 1903 they enquired into Rasputin and were told that he held dubious services in a secret chapel under a stable in Pokrovskoe.