Rasputin Read online

  Whether Yussoupov intended to carry on lying cannot be known. But, with his strong sense of theatre, he was soon finding the colourful truth too hard to contain. Within days, he was revelling in the telling of a wholly different sequence of events, beginning with his first glimpse of Rasputin at the flat door. He noted the efforts of the Man of God to clean himself up: Rasputin had combed the food out of his beard and now smelt of cheap soap. Later reports said that he had also covered his ears and neck with cologne. He took an unexpected pride in his ability to brush up, occasionally calling for scissors for his fingernails and perfumed pomatum for his stringy hair. Maria wrote, however, that, despite all his pains, her father had begun to feel apprehensive about the arrangement. She reported that he said to Yussoupov: ‘Must I leave tonight?’

  Maria herself was nervous. Though they were not suspicious of Yussoupov, Maria and her sister Varya had become worried about their father leaving the flat after dark. As he struggled to find his boots, he said: ‘It’s those children again, they have hidden them. They don’t want me to go out.’ But he finally found the boots and was ready to go. Maria, who, like Katya, had been unable to sleep, made unsuccessful attempts to comfort herself with her father’s maxim: ‘Nothing can happen to me unless it’s God’s will.’

  In her testimony to the police on December 18 Maria Rasputin said: ‘Later I went to sleep and did not see whether “The Little One” arrived and whether he and my father left together.’

  Years later, however, the fanciful Maria told a different story. She described herself back at her window, watching her father walking along the street, pulling up his collar and making the sign of the cross. She wrote that she wept as she watched him getting into a car with Yussoupov; and swore that, as the motor fired up, she spotted an elegant hand reach out to shut the car door.

  Rasputin never had any difficulty reconciling his weakness for beautiful young princesses with a passion for the simple life. During his last years, he spent many a happy hour at palaces repeating one of his favourite instructions: ‘Be glad at simplicity.’ He was full of invitations as unlikely as they were picturesque: ‘Come with me in the summer… to the open spaces of Siberia. We will catch fish and work in the fields. And then you will really learn to understand God.’

  He evidently wanted his listeners to know he set great store by his Siberian origins. But, as with so many of Rasputin’s pronouncements, it is hard to gauge the extent of his sincerity.

  What is certain is that the spiritual pride of puritans was among his biggest bugbears. The traditional Siberian had no qualms about embracing wine, women and song. In this Wild East of Russia, if a man could prove he had been drunk when attacking a judge, he would get only three days in prison. A Siberian picnic comprised a parcel of fresh cucumbers and a hearty pail of wine. According to one contemporary traveller, female binge drinkers in comic headgear lined the streets on freezing winter nights. The traveller described one incident during which the women hurled snow at men, then, in a grand crescendo, fell down and threw up their legs, ‘revealing the most remarkable sights’.

  The prevailing hedonism was combined with mystical fervour. Hunters in Siberia were reputedly able to teleport themselves from covey to covey. Religious sects flourished in the forests, ranging from groups of Old Believers quibbling over alterations in the liturgy to fanatics burning themselves to death. In extreme sects, baptisms by fire included male castration; women had their nipples and clitorises cut off while holding icons.

  Pilgrims, ‘stranniki’, wandered through the villages, telling spell-binding stories of their travels in return for food and a bed. Villagers left bowls of food and milk on their doorsteps; these would be snapped up by the stranniki, vagrants or escaped convicts, whoever was first. In Pokrovskoye, where Rasputin grew up, the bowls would have been particularly appreciated by the pigs that wandered freely up and down its main street.

  In Rasputin’s day, the village comprised 1,000 people in 200 houses. The villagers endured harsh winters, with temperatures dropping to minus 50, followed by spring thaws which reduced the rough main track to a sea of liquid mud.

  The Rasputins were one of Pokrovskoye’s oldest established families, with roots dating back to 1643. Rasputin’s supporters have been quick to point out that the family name was derived from ‘rasput’, meaning ‘crossroad’, and not ‘rasputnik’, debauchee, as was sometimes claimed. Indeed, in the early 1800s, Rasputin’s forebears, Ivan and Miron Rosputin (sic), were listed among the village’s ‘better souls’.

  Whether Rasputin’s father, Efim, carried on in the ‘better souls’ family tradition is a matter of argument. According to some reports, he liked strong vodka and was a ‘deplorable drunkard’. Though primarily heterosexual, he successfully cultivated young male lovers: this despite his appearance: ‘chunky, unkempt and stooped’.

  But at his funeral the family spoke of his religious dedication and untiring work on the farm. His dutiful granddaughter, Maria, portrayed him as a gentleman of the old school, sipping China tea while railing against the horse thieves who blighted the ‘better souls” lives: canny thieves would lasso their prey then make silent escapes, with the horses’ hooves wrapped in rags.

  It was claimed, by his supporters, that Efim Rasputin acquired conversational skills and wisdom through his job driving carts. This seems unlikely. He certainly took pride in his work, flaunting a smart carter’s badge on his left arm and a cap with an Imperial eagle. But rides on his route, ‘Trakt 4’, linking Tyumen and Tobolsk, were so rough that passengers in the clattering carts were obliged to lie full length on piles of hay to save their spines.

  Maria’s claim that Efim read the Bible to his family also seems far-fetched. In an 1877 census, conducted when little Grishka was eight, Efim indicated, with crosses, that the whole family was illiterate. Twenty-two years later, another census revealed that no progress had been made: the Rasputins, now including Grigory’s wife Praskovia, were still unable to read or write.

  Rasputin’s mother, Anna, was described in one report as ‘short and rotund’ but in another as ‘tall, slim with shining eyes’. The photographic evidence is flawed, as the images are blurred and there are conflicting captions. One indistinct photograph of her apparently exists in which she peers intently at the camera, perhaps suspicious of the new technology. Her loyal granddaughter, Maria, claimed that Anna kept a meticulously clean house.

  Rasputin’s parents married in 1862, when Efim was 20 and Anna 22. The Rasputins were relatively well off, apparently occupying an izba with an unlikely sounding eight rooms and owning 12 cows and 18 horses. They may have used their yard as a latrine, but they were not reduced to creating windows out of stretched animal bladders.

  The miasma of confusion surrounding Rasputin’s life begins in his childhood. Rumours and counter-rumours have sprung up, even concerning several mysterious siblings.

  Much has been made of real evidence that his parents lost four children before Rasputin was born; it has been suggested that this was some kind of divine warning. Three sons born after him also died. There may have been one surviving sister, Feodosia. Some biographies mention a brother, Misha or Dmitri, and a sister, Vara, who helped in the house; allusions have been made to a second epileptic sister, who fell into the river and drowned while doing the laundry.

  Amid these confusing details, it is perhaps understandable that, in her memoir, Maria got her own father’s birth date – January 9 1869 – wrong. Rasputin himself misled people, sometimes adding as much as eight years to his age. Considering himself a sort of elder to the Imperial family, he disliked being younger than the Tsar, who was born a year before him.

  According to Maria, her father’s birth was marked with a comet across the sky. Others claimed that babies were born that day with iron teeth and dogs with six legs; it was said that snakes fell from the sky.

  The stark contradictions that were to mark Rasputin’s life began shortly after his birth. Though his birth weight was an average seven pou
nds, he was freakishly advanced physically: standing at six months and walking at eight. This physical prowess was not matched, however, by any mental development and he was unable to speak until he was two and a half. His mother, Anna, became increasingly worried as the toddler stared interminably at the sky and at individual blades of grass. She thought he ‘was not quite right in the head’. She might have been relieved if she had advance knowledge of the 1917 Commission’s conclusion that there was no history of mental illness in the Rasputin family.

  His propensity for being virtually catatonic alternated with periods of great restlessness. When he was not holed up in the izba, staring fearfully at shadows, he would be running amok in the forest. He wet his bed, and cried so frequently that he was known as ‘sniveller’ and ‘snot nose’. Aged eight, he was swimming in a river with his cousin Dmitri when the boys got into difficulties. Though they were both rescued, Dmitri died of pneumonia shortly afterwards. In his grief, the young Grishka went off his food, barely touching his favourite pickled fish and stuffed eggs.

  Rasputin was 12 when his mystical gifts became apparent. First it was discovered that the family cows produced more milk if he was nearby. Then he cured a lame horse by placing his hand on its hamstring and throwing his head back. He was soon able to predict when a stranger was on the way; an hour after his announcement, a traveller would appear, in the distance, on Trakt 4.

  On one occasion, when he was lying ill, the boy overheard his father and friends discussing a recent horse theft. He struggled off his sick bed, came into the kitchen and pointed to the richest peasant: ‘He’s the one who stole the horse.’ The villagers followed the man home, discovered the stolen horse and, Siberian-style, beat the man half to death. Grishka claimed he never stole as a boy because he had visions of thieves ringed by their ill-gotten gains.

  As a child, Rasputin was not up for the usual Siberian games of convicts and soldiers. Nor did he attend school; in this he inadvertently followed the teaching of his namesake, Saint Grigory, who viewed learning as one of life’s obstacles. He eventually grew to enjoy some regular boyish pursuits: gorging on salted cucumbers, hunting, fishing and dancing the Kazachok, with bent knee. But he remained isolated, spending particularly desolate hours sitting by the roadside, thrashing himself with thistles. As he admitted: ‘I was an outsider.’

  His physical strength ensured that, despite his isolation, he was never a victim of bullying. Indeed, he succeeded in beating up the village bully, Boris, to some extent even stealing his crown. He was clearly impulsive. He once assaulted a beggar woman but, because of his age, there was no inquiry. He threw a 15-month-old girl into the river because she wouldn’t smile at him. At 14 he nearly killed a man who tried to rob him, for which he was punished with 20 strokes of the whip. A doctor who treated him for smallpox was impressed by the ‘ardent expression’ in his eyes but also described him as the ‘terror of the district’.

  Perhaps it was lucky that his violent impulses were tempered by a taste for mysticism. The desperate village priest offered the young terror bribes to stay away from Sunday services. But ten kopecks was not enough to keep Grishka from the white church with gilded domes that dominated Pokrovskoye. He even claimed to enjoy discussions about the scriptures with his one friend, called, like his dead cousin, Dmitri. As he said of his adolescence: ‘I dreamt of God many times… I wept without knowing why or where my tears came from.’

  He was so thrilled when he first heard about the ‘Kingdom of God within you’ that he had a vision of a bright light. The vision came to him while he was sitting under a larch tree. Years later, when Maria was aged ten, he took her to the same larch tree and told her how he had realised, then, that ‘God is here, inside, this moment – for ever.’ When he told his timorous mother that he’d ‘almost seen God’, she was worried that he had blasphemed and told him not to mention the vision to his excitable father.

  Rasputin’s enjoyment of the female form began innocently enough, watching fellow villagers skinny-dipping. At 16, however, he underwent some sort of sexual assault by the young wife of a general. Maria’s description of the assault leaves little to the imagination. Her information concerning the seamier side of her father’s life came from another of Rasputin’s maids, Dounia, aunt of the maid Katya. Dounia never shrank from telling Maria the fruitier details. The young girl kept a meticulous record of their chats in a school notebook.

  Maria describes how Rasputin was enticed by the general’s wife to a summer house on her large estate. She reached down his trousers, ‘grasped him gently, releasing him for a moment then touching him again’. After the grasps, she lay on a bed, gazing at him provocatively. Apparently he was about to pounce, when four maidservants appeared from behind curtains. These maidservants humiliated him, throwing water over him and ‘touching his out-thrust organ’.

  Fortunately for the young Grishka, Dounia was one of the maidservants. Seeing him for the first time, aged 14, she was immediately smitten. She took pity on him, found his scattered clothes and returned them to him. Dounia may have been captivated by his out-thrust organ; she was unlikely to have been attracted by his face. As a result of innumerable scraps, his large nose was already slightly askew and looked, according to one account, as if it had been slapped on with a trowel.

  This first sexual experience marked Rasputin’s debut as a serial seducer of women. From now on he would feel free to accost young women of all shapes and sizes, kissing them while struggling with vital buttons.

  But for all these insensitive fumblings, the teenage Grishka sometimes showed a soft heart. Later that same year, he saw a naked widow being dragged through the streets by a horse. She was being punished, according to the local custom, after having been found sleeping with a vagabond. Grishka pursued her into the forest and built her a hideaway. He visited her several times but, in a surprising turn-up for the books, left what remained of her honour intact: his restraint here is particularly laudable as she was purportedly the first woman he healed with caresses to the buttocks.

  It was during a visit to a religious fete in a monastery at Avalak, on the River Tobol, in 1886, that Grishka met his future wife, Praskovia Dubrovina. When they parted, Maria reported that her father left a ‘fervent kiss upon her willing lips’. It has been claimed that Praskovia, then aged 20, already felt left on the shelf and that her subsequent forbearance towards Grigory, then 17, stemmed from relief at being rescued from spinsterhood. But she seems to have had all the right attributes: she was plump, with dark eyes, small features and thick blonde hair. Though short, she was strong, an important asset in a wife expected to bear children while tackling the harvest. Photographs exist of the burly young Grishka but Praskovia is always absent.

  Grishka and Praskovia were married five months later, on February 2 1887, three weeks after the groom’s 18th birthday. Their first child was born the following year, but died at six months of scarlet fever. There was then a mysteriously long gap before the couple had twins, who both died of whooping cough. Could the rampant Grishka have restrained himself a full six years? That seems unlikely. But it seems almost more unlikely that the obliging Praskovia was keeping him at bay. In any case, they finally had their three surviving children: Dmitri in 1895, Maria in 1898 and Varya in 1900. A seventh child also died.

  Rasputin proved a trying husband. His defenders claim it was his mother Anna’s early death that drove him to drink. But then, according to some reports, Anna did not die until 1904.

  Either way, it was during his early years of marriage that he got into the habit of driving carts to Tyumen to collect grain, then returning on foot, penniless and drunk. He sold the family bread to get money for alcohol. At one point he was hit on the head by a neighbour while trying to steal fence posts. As the neighbour testified: ‘He wanted to run and was about to hit me with his axe, but I hit him with a stake so hard that blood starting coming from his nose and mouth.’ This developed into a medical emergency, as the nearest doctor was 70 miles away. The neighbour
was worried he had given Grishka permanent brain damage. Certainly Rasputin retained, for life, diabolic protuberances on his forehead. These were referred to, in several accounts, as ‘bumps of budding horn’.

  In 1891, aged 22, he was working for a Tobolsk haulier when he again mislaid his horse, claiming it had fallen in the river and drowned. He also lost a cartload of furs, which he insisted was stolen while he was relieving himself on the side of the road. The British chaplain in St Petersburg in the early 1900s, the Rev Bousfield Swan Lombard, wrote with disapproval of several randomly selected transgressions: ‘He was guilty of… many crimes, horse stealing, perjury and the rape of a very young girl’.

  During these roustabout years, Rasputin resembled Dostoyevsky’s Dmitri Karamazov, a blustering innocent, repeatedly falling prey to drink and gypsy women. He might have preferred a comparison to Dmitri’s gentler younger brother, the spiritual Alyosha: Rasputin loved to evoke the honey and flowers of Siberia. But he was not altogether ashamed of his youthful misdoings, readily incorporating them into his wondrous life story: ‘I was dissatisfied… I turned to drink’; ‘I was a drunkard and smoked tobacco but then I repented and just look what I made of myself.’

  Endless floggings and prison sentences proved counter-productive. Grishka had discovered ‘the joy of suffering and abuse’. It was not until 1897, when Rasputin was in his late twenties, that the authorities found an effective punishment: banishing him from Pokrovskoye and sending him to a monastery. He spent three weeks walking the 325 miles to the 40 churches of Verkhoturye, sleeping in barns on the way. His dissolute father had once vowed to visit Verkhoturye as a penance. Now his son would go in his place. Rasputin later grandly claimed an inner voice said: ‘Take up the cross and follow me.’