The Rasputin File (8 page)

Rasputin did not stay in Pokrovskoe for long, however. He abandoned his disciples and once again set out to visit the monasteries. And his wanderings became ever more rigorous. ‘For experience and to test myself,’ he said, ‘I frequently did not change my undergarments for six months at a time when going from Tobolsk to Kiev, and I would often walk for three days, eating only the slightest amount. On hot days I would impose a fast on myself. I would not drink kvass but would work with the day labourers just as they worked; I would work and then take my repose in prayer.’ This is the lofty manner in which Rasputin told the ‘tsars’ about his transformation in his ‘Life’.

But he told them nothing of what was at the heart of his wandering: the dangerous cloisters concealed deep in the remote Siberian forests, their remarkable beliefs, and the unofficial ‘Orthodoxy of the people’ that had actually formed both the semi-literate Siberian peasant and his mysterious teachings.

He told them nothing of the hidden religious Rus that had existed for hundreds of years alongside the official Church.

Hidden ‘Holy Rus’

Distrust of the official church had deep roots in Russia.

Christianity had been adopted in Rus a thousand years before in the tenth century. But paganism did not for that reason disappear. Christian
churches in Russia were often built on pagan holy places. The pagan gods that the princes had forced the people to repudiate lived on unseen. The pagan god Volos, for example, whose untrammelled power was manifest, according to pagan beliefs, in the alternating fecundity and destruction of the natural world, was transformed into ‘God’s servant, Saint Vlasy the Miracle Worker’. The pagan god of thunder, Perun, was supplanted by the prophet Elijah who caused the storms to rumble. And the pagan delight in nature, the pagan worship and deification of nature, remained in the people’s souls. The alacrity with which they agreed after the revolution to destroy their own great Orthodox temples at the behest of the Bolsheviks is strikingly similar to the ease with which they smashed and burned their pagan holy places at the order of the princes.

Entire regions lived through that thousand-year period in a blend of paganism and Orthodoxy. And the ancient sorcerers and saintly healers existed side by side, as well: the healers healed, and the sorcerers cast spells or warded them off.

Siberia and the Trans-Volga were the centres of that strange ‘Orthodoxy of the people’.

A ‘Russian America’

In the seventeenth century, the forests of the Trans-Volga extended without interruption to the far north. Standing along the banks of the Volga’s tributaries were occasional hamlets separated from each other by vast tracts of impassable forest. The people who lived in those hamlets were, in a sense, cut off from the rest of the baptized world, and the area’s Orthodox Russians resembled in their savage customs the primeval denizens of those places, the wild Cheremis and Votyak trappers. Weddings were celebrated in the forest, their participants at once worshipping the holy saints and trees. ‘They lived in the forest, they prayed to stumps, they married standing around a spruce, and devils sang to them,’ it was once said of the Trans-Volga’s inhabitants.

In the second decade of the seventeenth century, new residents began to appear in those impenetrable thickets. They were the children of the bloody Time of Troubles (1584–1613), which had rolled across the Russian land in insurrections and the collapse of the state. The Time of Troubles had ended with the accession of the Romanov dynasty to the throne. And now in flight from the rage of the new tsars, those involved in the recent mutinies fled to the Trans-Volga and Siberia. The very people who in the Time of Troubles had visited pillaging and bloodshed upon the entire Russian land.
They found refuge in the forested regions from the knout and the gallows. It was a unique ‘Russian America’.

A Disastrous Schism In The Russian Church

Later on, in the seventeenth century, new refugees added their numbers to the forests of the Trans-Volga and Siberia. The church reforms under Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich were accompanied by a renovation of the sacred texts and a change in the very mystery of signing the cross. Believers were now required to cross themselves with three fingers instead of two. The new Orthodoxy produced a sea of blood. Many believers declared the ‘new books’ and the new rites to be a temptation of Satan. They held to the old ways, crossing themselves as before, and reading only the old versions of the sacred texts. And they called themselves ‘Old Believers’.

The great schism in church life had begun. The official church harshly chastised the Old Believers. Imprisonment, execution, and mass self-immolation of the adherents of the old beliefs — all of this happened. And the Old Believers now established their holy cloisters beyond the reach of authority in the boundless forests of the Trans-Volga and Siberia.

As industry developed and the forests were logged, the schismatic cloisters in the Trans-Volga also began to retreat beyond the Urals — to the impenetrable forests of Siberia. So that for the entire three-hundred-year history of the Romanov dynasty there existed in Siberia alongside the official Orthodox Church an unofficial but powerful and secret ‘church of the people’.

The Tsar Rules The Church

That which Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich had begun by splitting the Russian Church, his son Peter the Great successfully continued. This reformer tsar destroyed the ancient patriarchate and openly mocked the old church rites. He also established, with a so-called chief procurator appointed by the tsar at its head, a Holy Synod which from that day forth would govern church affairs. And although Nicholas’s father, Alexander III, was a deeply religious man, the official church still remained subordinate to the tsar and still dragged out the same sorry existence under his reign that it had dragged out previously. Serving as the head of the Holy Synod as its chief procurator was the emperor’s favourite, K. Pobedonostsev. He was one of the cleverest people in the country. But, as frequently happens in Russia, his whole mind
was directed towards oppression. The least loophole for freedom of thought and speech was subjected to ruthless attack. He would destroy at the root, any law capable of mitigating even slightly the unlimited power of the tsar over the church. As head of the Holy Synod, this profoundly devout man did everything he could to contain the great and infinite world of church life within the framework of ruthless bureaucratization and to force the church hierarchs to recognize one law only: the command of the tsar and the chief procurator.

The official church found itself in a condition of profound lethargy.

Meanwhile, the social cauldron had begun to boil. Not long before he died, Tsar Alexander III had a conversation with one of his trusted advisers, the adjutant general O. Richter. ‘I sense that things in Russia are not going as they should,’ Nicholas’s father had said, and then he asked Richter to speak his mind. ‘I have given it a great deal of thought,’ Richter answered, ‘and I imagine the country in the form of a colossal boiler in which fermentation is taking place, while around the boiler walk people with hammers. And when in the boiler’s walls the slightest crack is formed, they immediately seal it up with rivets. But eventually the gases within will force such a crack that it will be impossible to reseal it, and we shall all suffocate!’ And, Richter recalled, the sovereign began to moan as if in pain.

The weak official church could no longer offer assistance in the event of catastrophe. The people did not trust it. Those who stood at the crossroads either went with their troubles in the direction of revolution, or turned for help to holy fools and elders or to the sectarians. To the cloisters lost in the forests.

The Elders’ Prophecies

Rasputin’s life had passed its halfway mark and was already hurtling towards death. His fourth decade had begun, and he was still going from monastery to monastery.

The faces of the holy images in their ancient frames glimmer before their lamps in the dark refectory. In three rows, extending to the windows stand tables, and on either side of them, benches. Here sit not only the monastery brethren but also the lay people visiting the monastery. A place is found for everyone. What a gallery of faces and types! How many passions overcome or repressed! How many instructive stories! He learned to read pitiable human passions in those faces. He saw the great power of a piety that could help to heal incurable diseases. But he also came to know the Siberian sorcerers and healers, who had brought from the heathen past the secrets of
their cures and spells. Thousands of faces and encounters, thousands of confessions and conversations into the night.

Under the icon cases are books in old black bindings and a little chalice — a copper cup with a cross on it that serves as a bell during meals. How many times had the wanderer Grigory Rasputin heard its ring signalling the start of a meal. How many times had he gazed with widened eyes at those ordinary-looking monks, the ‘elders’, whose spiritual feats the monastery had hidden from view.

The great elders, those who had achieved moral perfection and gained a wisdom that was unattainable in the world at large, lived in the monastery like the most ordinary monks. The monastery rules did not permit the display of spiritual riches on the outside, and it protected the spiritual growth of its votaries from worldly temptations. But that which was hidden during the day was recorded by night in a trembling elder’s hand. And how happy Grigory was whenever he succeeded in talking to these men. It was from them that he learned his tender, love-filled speech.

In the monasteries he heard about the elders’ prophecies regarding the destruction looming over the Romanov realm. Those predictions are now famous as the prophecies of the elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery and of Serafim of Sarov. But how many other divinations by obscure elders have perished in distant monasteries that were ravaged in the civil war and destroyed by the Bolsheviks? Rasputin brought back from his wanderings that sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom.

The ‘Russian Dream’

At the very beginning of his wanderings among the ancient cloisters hidden in the wilderness, Grigory also learned about a new spiritual experience that had first enticed and then come to rule over hundreds of people, and that had secretly captivated whole monasteries. They were secret fellowships, powerful in the rabid faith of their membership. Whilst other Christian sects came from the West, the
Khlysty
(Flagellants) and
Skoptsy
(Castrators) were an exclusively Russian phenomenon. They were sects in which fanaticism, lechery, and faith in God were blasphemously joined together as one. Sects that played a major role in the fate of Rasputin and of the empire.

The downtrodden condition of the people, the cruel oppression of the peasants, and the persecution of their ancestors’ old ways of worship all gave rise to the age-old ‘Russian dream’ of the advent of a Redeemer. At first, the dream was of an earthly Redeemer — a just ruler. And self-proclaimed
‘tsars’ accordingly made continual appearances over a two hundred year span in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

There have been pretenders of the kind in every country. But only in Russia did the phenomenon reach such a scale and enjoy such success. The first great impostor, the fugitive monk Grigory Otrepiev, declared himself the son of Ivan the Terrible and, to Europe’s amazement, routed the powerful Tsar Boris Godunov. And himself became the Muscovite tsar. And ruled until he was exposed and killed by the boyars. But as a result, instead of one impostor, there appeared a multitude of them. The people readily joined the forces of those ‘tsars’, and Russia was for many years embroiled in the great bloody insurrections of the Time of Troubles. More than a hundred such pretenders, each proclaiming himself to be the ‘true tsar’, were active in Russia during those two centuries. One such, the illiterate peasant Emelyan Pugachyov, assembled an army of several thousand peasants and Cossacks and very nearly put an end to Empress Catherine the Great herself.

Simultaneously active with the earthly tsar-pretenders over the full three-hundred-year reign of the Romanov dynasty were pretenders of the heavenly sort — the ‘Christs’.

The
Khlysty
And Sexual Frenzy

The
Khlysty
also appeared in Russia in the seventeenth century during the reigns of the first Romanovs. And became powerful. Their history begins simply enough. The sect’s founder was a certain Daniil Filippovich, who proclaimed himself the ‘Lord of hosts’. As
Khlyst
tradition describes him, ‘This Daniil Filippovich descended from heaven in great glory in a chariot of fire’ and remained on earth in the form of man. According to the same legend, ‘fifteen years before the advent of the “Lord of hosts” Daniil Filippovich, “God’s son” Ivan Suslov was born to a one-hundred-year-old Mother of God.’ At the age of thirty, Suslov was summoned by the ‘Lord of hosts’ Daniil Filippovich, who made him a ‘living god’. Thus, both the ‘Lord of hosts’ and ‘his son Christ’ had appeared in sinful Rus. Along with a ‘Mother of God’, who had given birth to the ‘Christ’. They had come to defend an aggrieved and impoverished people.

According to
Khlyst
tradition, the first ‘Christ’ Ivan Suslov was seized by the boyars, taken to Moscow, and crucified at the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate. But he rose from the dead. And they crucified him again, and again he rose. Afterwards, both Daniil Filippovich and Ivan Suslov died, or, more accurately, they returned to heaven, and others became new ‘Lords of hosts’, ‘Christs’, and ‘Mothers of God’.

The susceptibility of the
Khlyst
‘living Gods’ to decay did not trouble their benighted followers in the least. For according to
Khlyst
belief, with the departure from earthly life (or, more properly, the ascent to heaven) of the latest ‘Christ’, the Holy Spirit was installed in another body. So that during that time many ‘Messiahs’ lived in the bitter Russian land.