Titans of History

RASPUTIN

1869–1916

When the bell tolls three times, it will announce that I have been killed. If I am killed by common men, you and your children will rule Russia for centuries to come; if I am killed by one of your stock, you and your family will be killed by the Russian people! Pray Tsar of Russia. Pray.

Rasputin

Grigory Yefimovich Novykh was known as Rasputin, the debauched one and the Mad Monk.

An illiterate itinerant peasant, Rasputin was able to wield considerable influence over Russia’s autocratic rulers. He rose to prominence as an enigmatic mystic, finding a ready audience for his peculiar brand of religious devotion at a time when many Russian aristocrats were fixated by mysticism and the occult. He appears to have embraced a distorted version of the Khlysty creed, reworking its emphasis on flagellation to advocate sexual exhaustion as the surest path to God.

Introduced to the royal family in 1905, Rasputin eased the suffering of Tsarevich Alexei—the heir to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia who had been diagnosed with a hereditary bleeding disease, hemophilia. He swiftly became the confidant and personal adviser of Tsarina Alexandra (a German by birth), and when, in September 1915, Tsar Nicholas made himself commander-in-chief of the Russian armies following the outbreak of the First World War—spending much of his time at the front—fears grew that Rasputin was effectively running the country. Alexandra heeded Rasputin’s advice in sacking several ministers and appointing new ones—but ultimately authority lay with her and the tsar, who ratified all decisions and, indeed, had rebuffed Rasputin’s advice to stay out of the war.

Nicholas and Alexandra were actually inept, cruel, rigid and obtuse reactionaries. Nicholas, in a speech made in 1895, had deplored the “senseless dreams” of those seeking democracy, and had helped fund the murderous anti-Semitic Black Hundreds movement after crushing the 1905 Revolution. The country’s problems, then, were firmly down to the incompetence of the tsar and tsarina, but Rasputin provided a scapegoat.

Rasputin’s close relationship with the tsarina provoked rumors of sexual deviance at the Russian court led by the Mad Monk, and before long his position had become a national scandal. He came to symbolize the perceived corruption of the tsar’s rule—with stories widespread about Alexandra’s supposed lesbianism and Nicholas’ impotence. Finally, in December 1916, a high-level plot involving senior politicians, noblemen and members of the imperial family—desperate to safeguard the regime—succeeded in eliminating the cleric. Rasputin was poisoned, shot (twice), beaten and eventually dumped into the River Neva, where he finally drowned. His astonishing resistance to poison and bullets suggested to some the mysterious potency of his powers.