The Rasputin File (41 page)

Finale Of The First Period: The Mystery Remains

We have come as far as 1914, carefully following the track of Rasputin’s biography.

I have tried to tell everything in detail, and have patiently cited the testimony of both his friends and his enemies. But the two questions posed at the beginning remain. Just who was he really? And what was he for the royal family?

One thing is clear, however: Rasputin was no calculating Tartuffe who made fools of people with pious sermonizing. Tartuffe’s was a European personality. Rasputin’s is mysteriously Asiatic and a good deal more complicated, and his secret a good deal stranger.

I have quoted Rasputin’s thoughts at length. Were they searchings, appeals to God, moments of lucidity, insights? I can now answer that they were all those things.

But the prostitutes, the endless ‘little ladies’, the devotee’fools’, who visited the ‘special room’ and, becoming half-mad, mixed up religion with lust? And I can answer that yes, they too existed.

Yet at the same time Sazonov, Molchanov, and Filippov all speak in the File of this period of Rasputin’s life as a ‘spiritual’ one: ‘A period in Rasputin’s life that I may call a period in which he attained a certain spiritual loftiness from which he later slid’ (Sazonov), ‘in that period Rasputin drank little, and the whole period of his life bore the stamp of modesty’ (Molchanov), ‘being poetically dreamy in the first period of 1911–13’ (Filippov).

Did they not know about his secret life? But Filippov knew a lot. Then why do they speak of his spirituality? And, finally, the royal family: yes, Rasputin preached love, was disinterested, told the ‘tsars’ about things they did not know — about the work and everyday life of the common people, about the joys of the wanderer at one with nature and God — and
he relieved the tsarina’s attacks of nervousness, and instilled confidence in the tsar. And he saved their son.

But the unending articles in the newspapers, the police descriptions of his pursuit of prostitutes, the inquiries by the Duma with quotations from the evidence of his victims, the story of the royal children’s nurse. All this reached the tsar and tsarina. On every side. Both prime ministers, Stolypin and Kokovtsev, the maids of honour at court, the tsarina’s beloved sister Ella and the other members of the Romanov family all the way to the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich (in whom, by the way, the tsar continued have so much trust that he appointed him commander-in-chief in the war), the tsarina’s confessor Feofan — all these people told the tsar and tsarina about Rasputin’s debauchery. But they did not believe it!

Did not believe it? Or did they know something that explained his behaviour? Something that was beyond the ken of all those shallow accusers?

8

GAMES OF THE FLESH

The Mystery Of His Teachings

To venture an answer to all these questions, I shall first have to return to the attempt to explain Rasputin’s teachings.

Zhukovskaya says of Rasputin:

I first heard of him in Kiev. At the time I had just graduated from preparatory school and, thanks to a chance acquaintance, was visiting the secret meetings of God’s people, as they called themselves (much later I learned that they are also the ones called the
Khlysty)
. And it was there on the outskirts of the city during the usual evening tea with raisins, the favourite beverage of ‘God’s people’, that Kuzma Ivanych, as our host was called, suddenly started talking about the elder Grigory Rasputin … Narrowing his bright eyes (all the
Khlysty
have utterly special eyes: they burn with a sort of liquid, iridescent light, and sometimes the gleam becomes perfectly unbearable), he…said with reluctance, ‘He was one of our brethren, but we have since disavowed him: he has buried the spirit in the flesh.’

None of the most prominent experts in Russian sectarianism then doubted that Rasputin was a
Khlyst
. Alexander Prugavin, who devoted his whole life to study of the sects, and who as a Socialist-Revolutionary greatly respected the
Khlysty
and saw in them an ‘Orthodoxy of the peasantry’, collected the stories of people who had visited Rasputin, proving thereby that Rasputin was a
Khlyst
who, through his escapades, had distorted and compromised the
Khlyst
idea. The theologian Novosyolov, the head chaplain of the army and the navy Georgy Shavelsky, the celebrated philosopher Sergei Bulgakov, the archbishop Antony Volynsky, and the bishops Hermogen and Feofan — all both left and right — maintained that Rasputin was a
Khlyst
. And, finally, his friend Filippov testifies in the File that ‘Some
sense told me that [he] was a
Khlyst
… that he belonged to the
Khlyst
sect.’

Rasputin evidently did start out as an ordinary
Khlyst
. It is no coincidence that from the very start (in their investigations of 1903 and 1907) the Tobolsk Theological Consistory twice concerned itself with his
Khlyst
affiliation. And if the second investigation may be attributed to harassment by the Montenegrin princesses and Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, then to whose influence is the first investigation to be ascribed? And although the second investigation was broadly conceived, the poor training of the Tobolsk investigators in sectarian questions wrecked it (as Inspector Beryozkin admitted in the file). In the interrogation of Rasputin’s adherents, the investigators were overmatched by their fanatical faith in his holiness. Nonetheless, one of those adherents, Khionia Berladskaya, subsequently wrote a ‘Confession’, as we have seen, with testimony about the lechery that she and Father Grigory were engaging in at the time. And Rasputin himself, who categorically rejected the dangerous accusations that he went to bathhouses with women, would soon afterwards in Petersburg be saying quite the opposite. So he had lied during the investigation, as had his followers, since they did not wish or were unable to explain to clergy of the official church the mystical secrets their remarkable teacher had revealed to them.

The Secret Of His Friendship With Iliodor

But evidence of Rasputin’s closeness to the
Khlysty
is not only to be found in the story of the Tobolsk inquiries; it is also provided by Rasputin’s sworn enemy the monk Iliodor. And not by his writing, but by his behaviour after he resigned from holy orders. Retained in the Tobolsk archive is the testimony of those of Iliodor’s votaries who followed him to the farm where the monk resided after his defrocking. Iliodor had built a new house there, which he symptomatically called ‘New Galilee’ (‘New Israel’ was a
Khlyst
community outside Petersburg). And he began to preach his own remarkable new doctrine.

That doctrine has been set forth by his admirer Sinitsyn: ‘Christ was crucified, Iliodor states, but it was not he who was resurrected but the eternal truth that he preached and that Iliodor now preaches.’ And Iliodor ‘will create a new religion and, thanks to that religion, the whole life of people will be changed’. And so that it would be clear that he was the
founder of a new religion and therefore a new Christ, Iliodor began to wear a white robe like that worn by Jesus. And ‘he blessed those who came to visit him as Jesus did, by laying his hand on the head of the one he was blessing … And he openly called himself the “King of Galilee”.’ And so in ‘New Galilee’ with its new ‘King of Galilee’, another
Khlyst
‘ark’ was formed. Iliodor no longer dissimulated. He proved to be quite simply a
Khlyst
. And that secret
Khlyst
affiliation of his (which proved a very unpleasant surprise for Hermogen and Feofan) apparently also explains why Rasputin formed such a close friendship with and had such a remarkable trust in the ill-fated monk.

A
Khlyst
Encounter In Tsarskoe Selo

Even more interesting is the testimony of the famous poet and sectarian Nikolai Klyuev.

‘They called me a Rasputin,’ Klyuev wrote in an 1918 poem. Klyuev’s destiny began, as he himself said, when ‘an elder who had come from Afon’ (a
Khlyst
sect had been crushed at the Afon Monastery) said that ‘I myself … ought to become a Christ.’ And the elder introduced Klyuev to the ‘brethren’. And Klyuev’s wandering began. ‘The Dove-brethren [as the
Skoptsy
were called] … brought me virtually to the ends of Russia to the province of Samara. I lived there for two years as King David in a large Golden Ark of white dove-Christs, and then with various people of secret identity, I walked all over Russia.’ They became so enamoured of the
Khlyst
poet Klyuev in Petersburg that he was called to Tsarskoe Selo. He was brought to the tsarina at the Alexander Palace, where, as he recalled, ‘on a wooden stage covered with velvet brocade in a cold hall of the Tsarskoe Selo palace I stood before a row of golden chairs dressed in crude peasant boots, an alumnus of the barn and an emissary of the bear.’ And then he had a conversation with Rasputin.

‘We had not seen each other for seventeen years, and now God had brought us to press our lips together … We kissed … as if we had only parted the day before … and a conversation took place … I tried to speak to Rasputin in the secret language of the soul about the birth of Christ in man … He answered irrelevantly and finally admitted that he had become a strict follower of Orthodoxy… Upon leaving, I did not kiss Rasputin again but bowed to him in monastery style.’

Most likely Rasputin, the friend of the tsars, simply did not want to and could not acknowledge his former acquaintance. Especially since his own
teaching, although created ‘on the basis of orthodox
Khlyst
doctrine’, had moved a good distance beyond it, as Prugavin correctly observed. Rasputin had created his own personal teaching.

An Imperceptible Halo

‘An Orthodoxy of the people’, a present-day priest has described Rasputin’s teaching to me. A naive Orthodoxy of the people that began with great holiness and ended in great sin.

But first a few words about the
Khlyst
Resurrection of Christ in man. For that resurrection to take place, it is necessary to suppress the flesh and sin. That is, in order to achieve a transformation of the soul, one must first mortify the Old Testament Adam in oneself — the man of sin. And to do that, it is necessary to reject everything worldly: honour and glory, love of oneself, even shame. And to care about one thing alone: God’s will. Only then will everything worldly in you pass away and the voice of God be heard. This in fact is the mystical
Khlyst
Resurrection, when in you there is no longer ‘yours’ but only the mind and thought of God. And then the Holy Spirit will come to dwell in you, and your mysterious transformation into a new Christ will occur. But that path to ‘God in oneself’ is long and painful.

From Zhukovskaya’s memoirs: ‘Munya gave an especially good account of how Grigory Efimovich mortified his flesh…how in the heat of the day he stood for hours in a swamp, placing himself at the mercy of mosquitoes and midges. Now he can permit himself anything: the one who has subdued his own flesh need fear no temptation!’

And after his wanderings, when he sensed the ability in himself to heal and even to prophesy, he came to believe that God was in him.

There is an echo of this in the File in Filippov’s testimony about Rasputin’s diet. It turns out that it was not merely a diet but also a path to the ‘divine in oneself’. ‘Rasputin did not merely avoid eating meat … He ate fish, as Christ and the apostles had done. And by apostolic rule, he ate with his hands…breaking his bread and never slicing it … Moreover, he found that meat blackens man, whereas fish lightens him. Therefore, both from the apostles and from those people who eat fish there always emanate beams of light like a halo, albeit an imperceptible one.’

He saw himself as having just such an ‘imperceptible halo’, and so did his devotees.

His Mission

But at the same time, Rasputin apparently suffered bitterly. His ferocious temperament would not allow him to defeat lechery completely, to forget about woman’s flesh. And it was evidently then that he began to reflect: if, despite all his great spiritual feats, the hunger for the flesh still remained, then it was probably there for a reason, and some purpose was hidden in it. For he had not experienced the torment of the flesh without reflection. It had been a kind of sign. And gradually he came to realize that it was his mission. He who had achieved great perfection was obliged to heal others as well of the torments of the flesh, of the Old Testament Adam within. And above all to heal them — women, those weak divine creatures, those vessels of sin in whose very nature was concealed the devil-pleasing thirst for lechery. Of course, as we shall see, he could heal men, as well. But to undertake his mission, he had to continue his discipline and become truly impassive. As impassive as the saints. Thus did he begin to create his doctrine.

The Naked Rasputin

It was indeed in Rasputin’s relations with women that the naive, rather frightening mysticism of the doctrine discovered by the ignorant peasant was hidden. As is clear from the File, those relations greatly worried his friend and publisher Filippov. And that apparently is why Filippov tried to talk to Rasputin about them. But Rasputin was evasive. For Filippov, an ordinary man living in the external world, could not understand him. ‘He would even … quickly and facetiously attempt to change the subject whenever someone started in on a more or less ribald theme.’ Nevertheless, Filippov was once quite startled by his supposedly modest friend.

Once when he was staying with me, Rasputin, unbeknownst to me, went into the kitchen where at the time my maid, a very pretty Ukrainian, was working. Re-emerging, he said, ‘What a little stinker you’ve got there!’

‘How’s that?’ I asked.