The Rasputin File (7 page)

‘I hit him with a stake, the blood flowed’ — it was all so ordinary. Savage, bloody fist fights were a common affair in Siberia. Rasputin’s build was anything but powerful, but even so, he was, as we shall subsequently have occasion to see more than once, a person of unusual physical strength. So the beating he took from the by no means young Kartavtsev probably made little impression on him. It was no accident that, as Kartavtsev says, he immediately took up his thieving again: ‘Soon after the theft of the stakes from me, a pair of horses was stolen from the common pasture. I myself was guarding the horses and saw Rasputin and his comrades ride up to them. But I didn’t give it any meaning. Several hours later I discovered the horses were missing.’

His plucky companions rode off to the city to sell the horses. But, according to Kartavtsev, Rasputin for some reason let the horses go and returned home.

No, something did happen to Rasputin in the course of that beating. The simple Kartavtsev’s explanation that Rasputin ‘turned kind of strange and stupid’ is inadequate here. No, he could not have understood Rasputin’s dark, complicated nature. When, during the beating, the blow of the stake had seemed in danger of killing him and the blood had started running down his face, Rasputin evidently experienced something. The beaten youth sensed a strange joy in his soul that he would later call ‘the joy of abasement’, ‘the joy of suffering and abuse’. ‘Abuse is a joy to the soul,’ he
would explain several years later to the writer Zhukovskaya. That is why Grishka went so unresistingly to take his punishment at the regional office. And why after the second theft he did not go to town to sell the horses. Maybe it was his moment of rebirth. And his fellow villagers apparently sensed a change in him. It can be no accident that when after the theft of the horses, ‘the matter was brought to court of banishing Rasputin and his comrades to eastern Siberia for their vicious behaviour’, his comrades were sent away at ‘the verdict of society’, but Rasputin was released.

It was time for him to marry, time to bring two more working hands into the household. His wife Praskovia (or Paraskeva) Fyodorovna was from the neighbouring village of Dubrovnoye. She was two years older than Rasputin. Wives in the villages were often chosen not for their youth or beauty but for their strength, so they could work hard in the fields and at home.

According to the 1897 census, although twenty-eight, Rasputin had not yet set up his own household and he continued to live with his father’s family. The family consisted of its head, Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin, fifty-five; his wife, Anna Vasilievna, also fifty-five; his son Grigory, twenty-eight, and Grigory’s wife, Praskovia Fyodorovna, thirty. All were registered as farmers, and all were illiterate.

Praskovia was an exemplary wife. She bore her husband three sons and two daughters. But more important she was a good worker. Working hands were very much needed in the Rasputin household because Grigory himself was often absent visiting holy places. By then his transformation was complete.

‘I came to the conclusion that in the life of the simple peasant Rasputin a kind of great and profound experience had occurred that utterly changed his psyche and compelled him to turn to Christ,’ the investigator of the Extraordinary Commission T. Rudnev would later write.

The Mystery Begins

‘Until I was twenty-eight, I lived, as people say, “in the world;” I was with the world, that is, I loved what was in the world,’ Rasputin himself recounted. Twenty-eight was the boundary, the moment when the transformation took place.

Legend has it that Rasputin once worked as a coachman, that he used his own horses to carry people back and forth along the highway. One day he was on his way to Tyumen with Melety Zborovsky, a seminary student who later became a bishop and then the rector of the Tomsk Theological
Seminary. They started talking about God. And the conversation produced a profound change in Rasputin’s soul. Or more exactly, it would seem, his soul had long anticipated such a conversation.

It was a conversation about a merciful God who waits for the return of the prodigal son until the very last human breath, so that ‘in the eleventh hour it is still not too late to come to Him.’ Melety told him the essential words: ‘Go and be saved.’

Rasputin wanted a continuation of that conversation. But he failed to get from the typically uneducated village priest in Pokrovskoe what he had received from the future magister of theology. Whereupon he decided to set off on his own in search of spiritual nourishment — the ‘angelic bread of the human soul’.

He first went to the monasteries near his village of Pokrovskoe, to the Tyumen and Tobolsk cloisters. His life as a wanderer had begun. He went by foot along the deep river Tura. And, as he wrote in his ‘Life’, in the course of those wanderings, ‘I saw before my eyes the image of the Saviour Himself walking along the shore. Nature taught me to love God and converse with Him.’ This primal pagan worship of nature was very important for his subsequent teachings. For his was a God who lives in the trees and resounds in the voices of birds and gazes at the traveller from every blade of grass.

He returned to his village already a different person. It was in fact then, during his wanderings, that he began to comprehend a certain mystical secret.

And now visions began to visit him ever more frequently. Visions and miracles became his reality. And he felt the divine in himself ever more distinctly. ‘Once,’ he related, ‘I spent the night in a room where there was an icon of the Mother of God. And I woke up in the middle of the night and saw that the icon was weeping: “Grigory, I am weeping for the sins of mankind. Go, wander, and cleanse the people of their sins.”’

But in Pokrovskoe they did not trust the former merry drunk and fornicator. And at home they laughed at him, too. Once during a prayer when the members of his family were laughing at his piety, ‘he stuck his shovel in a pile of grain and set off, just as he was, to visit the holy places.’

The Wanderers Of Vanished ‘Holy Rus’

Thus he became a new person. And not only did he stop drinking and smoking; he stopped eating meat and sweets. He became a pilgrim or wanderer
(strannik)
.

In times past, wandering had been a vital part of Russian life. Every peasant made a pilgrimage to holy places. As a rule, these were famous monasteries celebrated for their relics of saints and their miracle-working icons. The gentry made pilgrimages, too. They ‘wandered’ in carriages, whilst the peasants went on foot with knapsacks on their backs. Even the Russian empresses Elizabeth and Catherine the Great made pilgrimages.

At the end of the nineteenth century, however, only isolated individuals took up wandering. Holy Rus was becoming a legend. And now very few ‘God’s people’ abandoned their homesteads to set out on foot to worship at the holy icons and relics. In his ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’, Rasputin tells of spending time in Kiev monasteries, Moscow churches, and Petersburg temples. From his Siberian village he had walked thousands of versts to Kiev and Petersburg along endless Russian roads with a knapsack on his back, begging for alms and a place to sleep. And so he went from village to village, church to church, and monastery to monastery. The peasants in the villages gave him shelter in consideration of his divine task. They saw in wanderers the last heirs of the disappearing God-pleasing days of old. From time to time on a lonely road robbers would attack the defenceless wanderer. And as Rasputin relates in his ‘Life’, ‘I would say to them, it is not mine but God’s. Take from me. I give it to you gladly.’ And finally on the endless road a village would appear and a little village church. ‘The ringing of its bell gladdens the heart.’ But instead of joy at finding a temple of God, ‘the devil would whisper of the flesh to the tired wanderer, saying, “Take your place in the parvis, gather alms, the road is long, much money is needed, pray they take you in for dinner and feed you better.” I had to struggle against such thoughts.’

Satan Nearby

Satan’s greatest ruse is to convince us that he does not exist, but for Rasputin Satan was not only a reality, but was always nearby. Satan, he writes, would appear to him ‘in the form of a beggar, he would whisper to the weary wanderer tormented by thirst that it is many versts to the next village’. Rasputin would ‘make the sign of the cross or begin to sing a hymn of the cherubim…and then you would look, and there would be a village’.

A witness who had seen Rasputin after one of his pilgrimages told the Extraordinary Commission that ‘he seemed abnormal … He sang something and waved and threatened with his hands.’ That would forever remain his way — to speak to Satan constantly and to threaten him, calling on God with hymns for aid in his struggle with the devil. ‘A cunning enemy’, he
wants to return to his own power the soul that has been promised to God. ‘And people help him in this. Everyone watches the person who seeks salvation as though he were some sort of robber, and all are quick to mock him,’ Rasputin writes in his ‘Life’.

All this time Rasputin’s strange nervous organization was causing him difficulty, especially in the spring.

‘Every spring I would not sleep for forty nights,’ Rasputin remembers in his ‘Life.’ ‘Thus it had been from the age of fifteen to thirty-eight.’ But in the world of miracles, where he now resided, the treatment was simple. One had only in sincere prayer to ask for the help of a favourite saint. And Rasputin would appeal to Saint Simeon of Verkhoturye.

The Mighty Saint

The constant goal of his wanderings all this time was the Nikolaev Monastery in Verkhoturye. This ancient cloister, founded by the Muscovite tsars in the sixteenth century, stood on a hill at the confluence of two small streams. And the devout from all over Siberia came there to pay homage to its relics of the righteous Simeon.

Saint Simeon of Verkhoturye was becoming Rasputin’s favourite saint. And it was to him that he linked the emergence of his own mysterious strength.

Simeon of Verkhoturye was born at the very beginning of the seventeenth century and lived nearby on the banks of the same Tura river. A wanderer like Rasputin, he went among the local villages or lived by himself on the banks of the Tura. Rasputin was shown the stone under the spruce where the saint was fond of sitting. Simeon’s death was the consequence of extraordinary abstinence and fasting in 1642. Half a century later, as is written in the official
Life of Saint Simeon
, it was ‘noticed that his coffin had begun to rise up out of the earth, and that his uncorrupted remains could be seen through the splintered boards.’

And healing began at the holy grave. The first person to be healed at the end of the seventeenth century, according to the
Life of Saint Simeon
, bore the name Grigory and took ‘earth from the coffin, rubbed his limbs with it, and was healed’. For the next two hundred and fifty years pilgrims came from all over Russia to be healed at Saint Simeon’s grave. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Simeon’s relics were solemnly transferred to the Nikolaev Monastery in Verkhoturye.

And as Rasputin would write, it was next to his relics that ‘Simeon the
Righteous of Verkhoturye healed me of the affliction of insomnia.’ Simeon became his patron saint. And until his death Rasputin would visit the monastery and take his mad admirers there.

As we shall see, he would call on Simeon of Verkhoturye for help in his first attempt to reach the royal family. And his first gift to the royal family would be an icon of Saint Simeon. Simeon would as it were accompany him on his spiritual quest. And later, when Rasputin’s life took a downward turn, Simeon would follow him to his death.

For when the royal family perished in the summer of 1918, the relics of Saint Simeon would perish too, ejected from the monastery by the Bolsheviks.

It was at the time of his rebirth that Rasputin’s prophecies began. As he related it to Zhukovskaya, ‘When the Lord visited me … I took leave of my senses … and I started to run through the village in a frost wearing only my shirt and calling for repentance. And then I fell with a crash by a fence, where I lay for a day … Then I awoke … and the peasants came running to me from every direction. “You spoke the truth, Grisha,” they said. “We should have repented long ago, for tonight half the village has burned down.”’

Thus, it was at the start of the new twentieth century that his fame and the rumours of his miracles began. As Feofan, then inspector of the Petersburg Theological Seminary, told it, ‘It was given to him to close the heavens, and drought fell upon the earth until he ordered the heavens to open themselves up again.’

But, as we read in the testimony given before the Extraordinary Commission, Rasputin would more and more frequently return from his travels accompanied by ‘two or three female wanderers dressed in something like nun’s garb.’

The Chapel Under The Stable

It is no coincidence that Saint Serafim of Sarov, one of the last great Russian saints of the nineteenth century, also went about surrounded by young women.

Among Rasputin’s first disciples were Evdokia (Dunya) and Ekaterina (Katya) Pechyorkina (not sisters, as they are frequently identified in the
Rasputin biographies, but an aunt and a niece), who lived with him ‘earning their bread’ as domestics.

Katya, at the time very young, would eventually follow him to Petersburg, where she would become his maid. And it was she who would be fated to see the face of Rasputin’s murderer on that December night in 1916.

There were few men in that circle. Just his relative Nikolai Rasputin, and two other fellow villagers, Nikolai Raspopov and Ilya Arsyonov.

In the future inquiry of the Tobolsk Consistory into the charge against Grigory Rasputin of sectarianism, Nikolai Rasputin would testify that ‘a chapel was at the time located under the stable.’ And as the witnesses of the Extraordinary Commission would testify, ‘they gathered in great secrecy in a dugout under the stable, and sang and read the Gospels, the hidden meaning of which Rasputin would explain to them.’ But the investigation would learn nothing more of the hidden meaning revealed by Rasputin in that chapel under the stable.