RASPUTIN--A SYMBOL
To the ignorant and almost illiterate peasant Rasputin is attributed
a rôle akin to that of Samson in pulling down the pillars of the
Russian Tsardom. His sinister influence on the conduct of the war,
his co-operation, deliberate and unwitting, with the foreign enemies
of Russia, the wrath which his outrageous conduct aroused against the
autocrat and the autocracy, are set down by contemporary annalists
among the principal causes of the Russian Revolution.
But the evidence adduced in support of this view is wholly
inadequate. If the slovenly mooshik from Siberia had never existed,
other charlatans would have wielded the sorcerer's wand in his stead.
Before he appeared there had been no lack of them. "If only I have
honey," says the Turkish proverb, "the flies will come from Baghdad."
To the honey in Tsarskoye Selo they came from France and Montenegro,
but competition was open to all the peoples of the world.
It is my belief that although friends of his--men like Stürmer,
Protopopoff, and the Metropolitan Archbishop Pitirim--were
influential, Rasputin their friend was only a symbol.
In a little Siberian village named Pokrovskoye, among the fens of
Tiumen (province of Tobolsk), where the haunts of human beings are
few and far apart, Gregory Rasputin first saw the light of day. The
inhabitants, mostly sons and daughters of convicts, with developed
atavistic tendencies, enjoyed an evil reputation among the
neighbouring hamlets and villages, and prominent among them Gregory's
father, known by the Christian name of Efim, eked out a precarious
livelihood by horse-stealing. Brought up in this tainted atmosphere,
the boy Gregory or Grisha {197} readily fell in with his
surroundings, and from the time when he began to strike out his own
walk in life--that of a carter--was known as "Rasputin," an
appellation which comes from the word _rasputnik_--debauchee. It is
alleged by his enemies that from the first he was a lost soul,
utterly cynical, vicious, and callous, but this is probably an
exaggeration. People found something to like or admire in him even
then. He made at least two friends in his childhood, the one a
gardener named Barnabas or Varnava, and the other an ordinary peasant
Striaptcheff--both hooligans--and he retained and reciprocated their
friendship to the end of his life. With the former, who subsequently
became a monk, I was personally acquainted before Rasputin had him
raised to the dignity of Bishop of Tobolsk, from which height he was
afterwards gently lowered with the empty title of "Ex-Archbishop."
It is curious to note how the cardinal doctrine of Rasputin's later
theology embraces and summarises his own proclivities and practices.
It runs thus: "Sin in order that you may repent and obtain
forgiveness." For he appears to have sinned freely in his
unregenerate days and with a zest which he was wont to avow when
answering those who rebuked him, "A libertine (Rasputin) I am and a
libertine (Rasputin) I will remain!" It is in accordance with the
fitness of things that some of the most helpful documentary materials
for the early life of this extraordinary man should be laid away in
the archives of the criminal court of Tobolsk. Gossip which would
fain pass for history, and for aught we know is history without its
hall-mark, but with some of its credentials, lays horse-stealing,
perjury, and the rape of an old woman and of a very young girl to his
charge. For the second of these offences he was sentenced to be
flogged. On neither of the other charges was he actually convicted,
but they were not formally quashed until after his tragic death. If
drunkenness were a criminal offence in those remote regions, Rasputin
would have been a hardened criminal, for that and unclean living were
his besetting sins. The utmost he could accomplish by the most
strenuous {198} religious effort, after his conversion, was not to
eradicate, but only to restrict and re-label them.
But inebriety and debauch were not his only vices in those early
days. The most quarrelsome among the villagers, he was the principal
figure in well-nigh every vulgar brawl. Sometimes he would drive his
cart to the town of Tiumen for hay, and return home a few days later
drunk and disfigured, without the hay, without the money, and
occasionally without the horses. And this disordered life he
continued to lead until some fourteen years ago, when he attained the
age of thirty and the state of grace. In Russia, where spontaneous
repentance is generally the ultimate phase of crime, and religious
conversion the last evolutionary stage of the sinner, touching
charity on the part of the Russian people can be confidently reckoned
upon by the evil-doer expiating his offences. Rasputin was no
exception to the rule, but his spiritual regeneration began at a
relatively early period, while he was still capable of sinning,
having been occasioned by one external influence and gradually
modified by another.
His journey to Damascus, as he is said to have termed it, consisted
of a drive to Verkhoturie, a town some twenty miles distant from his
native village. He was conveying thither a priest named Zaboroffsky,
who is now the Rector of the Theological Academy of Tomsk, a pious
theologian and zealous churchman, who entered into conversation with
him about the brevity of life, the necessity of preparing for death,
the hideousness of sin, and the means of achieving salvation. He
exhorted Rasputin, whose evil fame had reached even him, to do
penance and lead "the god-like life," as they term it in Russia.
Like most peasants in the Tsardom, Rasputin evinced a keen interest
in these and kindred subjects, put various questions to his fare, and
by the time he reached his destination felt moved to his innermost
depths. "When I took leave of Father Zaboroffsky," he told a friend
long afterwards, "I fell into a profound meditation, and at its close
my mind was made up: I resolved to do penance for my {199} sins, to
lead a godly life ever after, and to help those who like myself were
plunged in ignorance and iniquity." He naturally had the traditional
vision. A saint (Simon) appeared to him and commanded him to give up
his vicious habits, and as is usual in such cases, the contrite
sinner resolved firmly to repent and turn from his evil ways. This
temporary detachment from all but the cares of death and salvation
meant to Rasputin immunity from the prison house or the convict
settlement. Thereupon the gates of many a monastery were open to him
had he chosen to become a monk, but whether from a sense of his own
unworthiness, or because he was still too illiterate, or in obedience
to a common Russian impulse to wander, he chose the painful but
varied existence of a pilgrim, tramping from village to village, from
shrine to shrine, without scrip or purse, barefoot and bare-headed,
living on alms and collecting offerings for churches. Among other
places he visited Jerusalem.
Although he felt no vocation for the monastic life, Rasputin visited
several monasteries and displayed an eager curiosity to become
acquainted with the scriptures and the fathers of the Church. During
a protracted stay in one of these retreats[1] he learned to read, and
applying this accomplishment to the study of the Bible, of Church
history, and of a few of the writings of the fathers, he acquired a
smattering of what his enthusiastic followers ranked as "theology."
During the two years which passed in this preparation for his
mission, he was assisted by the monks, with whom he was accustomed,
after the manner of Russians who brood, to discuss religious and
metaphysical problems with keenness, interest, and the conceptions of
a child. With all this he never learned to write grammatically,
orthographically, or even legibly. But he did not long abide in
those tents of Kedar which afforded too little scope for a schemer
who may have felt semi-consciously that his oyster was the vast
Empire of all the Russias. Within a few years of his departure from
this peaceful Abalaksky Monastery, he had soared aloft and was
circling above the Tsardom.
{200}
It is easy to smile incredulously at the religious conversion of a
low-minded being like Rasputin, who breathed an atmosphere of vice
and bewrayed an inherited tendency to crime. Reading it in the light
of his subsequent conduct, one feels tempted to label this apparent
change for the better as an act of downright hypocrisy. But such
simplicism in appreciating mixed motives argues unacquaintance with
the intricacy and subtlety of the moral world in general, and of
Russian psychology in particular. Nowhere are good, bad, and
indifferent motives so inextricably interwoven as in the Russian
conscience, nowhere are the conflicting issues of action harder to
size up. The elements of personality which only in rare critical
moments are called into play, to bring forth the deciding act that
shall set its stamp on the moral individuality, are precisely those
which the surface agitations of every-day existence leave wholly
untouched. Hence they are unknown to the outsider, the friend, the
confidant, nay, to the man himself, until the circumstances arise
that bring them into action. The Russian character is a many-chorded
instrument and the every-day notes, touched by the ordinary events of
a life-time, give no impression of those other passionate sounds
which a sudden and subtle appeal is capable of evoking. A certain
heroic force for good or evil is often dormant for years in an
individual which only the stress of storm can awaken. In any case,
it would be rash to refuse to Rasputin credit for all the earnestness
and sincerity of which his shallow nature was capable. I have known
many peasants like him in various parts of the vast Russian Empire
who, so far as I could judge by observation, lacked only the
opportunity to rival his feats, but who, for want of temptation,
never swerved very widely from the line of conduct which they had
adopted at their conversion. Rasputin himself was at no time
callous. Even in the days of his alleged omnipotence he could never
dispense with friendship nor turn a deaf ear to the cries of the
suffering. He was ever ready to hie to the assistance of the poor
and the friendless. When he sat comfortably in his reception room at
the house of the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, {201} receiving
the high and the lowly, he displayed open-hearted interest in the
woes of the latter and readily contributed to assuage their misery
and better their lot. His deepest instincts were those of his
people, and hardness of heart is assuredly not among their failings.
This view is confirmed by the testimony of adversaries like the
Bishop of Saratoff, Hermogen.
Morbid retrospection is almost an inherent quality of many Russians
and asceticism its ordinary outcome. Debarred for ages from all
forms of activity fitted to satisfy the mind, the Russian broods over
the mental and material conditions of his existence and analyses his
relations to that unseen world into which his religion gives him a
glimpse. These meditations frequently touch the more timorous souls
with a species of madness, distorting their piety into superstitious
terror and criminal practices. But despite these spiritual visions,
the earthiness of the individual is still there, merely dormant.
Rasputin then was no mere hypocrite. For a time at least he
subjected himself to the discipline which he advocated, and
endeavoured in his primitive way to provide individual life with a
spiritual or emotional basis. On his journeys to Odessa, Kieff,
Moscow, and Petrograd, and after his return home, he distinguished
himself by a degree of austerity in observing the practices of his
faith which astonished his neighbours and set many of them thinking
about the meaning of life and their relations to the Unseen. He was
always the first to enter the church, the last to leave it, and the
most contrite in bewailing his transgressions. He would expose his
half-naked body to the wintry winds, walk barefoot in the snow, and
fast for days. When kneeling before the altar he would strike the
ground with his forehead in the usual Orthodox way, but with such
unusual violence that the blood trickled down his face.
These and other austerities, coupled with the consideration in which
he was held by some of the villagers, filled him with spiritual
pride. His head was gradually turned. His knowledge of "theology"
and his works of penitence seemed {202} to raise him to dizzy heights
of perfection. To those who questioned him about his conversion he
gave an account which set it on a par with that of St. Paul, and
hinted in obscure phrases that the divine light then vouchsafed him
was shining still within, enabling him to discern things hidden,
present and future. His pilgrimage and self-imposed penances having
obtained for him the appellation of Starets or elder--a name accorded
not to monks or priests, but to laymen who have renounced the world
and live only for God and the salvation of their own souls--he sought
to add to it the titles of wonder-worker and prophet. Whenever his
neighbours put a question to him he would look dreamily away into the
distance, remain silent for several minutes, and then reply slowly
and in disconnected phrases as though awakening from a trance. The
penitent thief was occasionally merged in the crafty charlatan.
Like so many other notorieties who play a flashy part on the world's
theatre, Rasputin strove to live up to his strange reputation without
doing too great violence to his ingrained leanings. And he attracted
several admiring as well as believing followers, even in his own
native village. For in addition to remarkable hypnotic power he
possessed an inexhaustible fund of low cunning, was wonderfully quick
in perceiving the weaknesses of his fellows, and supple in adjusting
his action to them. He felt that a considerable element of mysticism
lies dormant in the soul of nearly every Russian which a death, a
disappointment, a bout of illness, or an earnest word of exhortation
may at any moment awaken to activity, with far-reaching consequences.
This religious temperament explains the number, variety, and strange
character of the sects in the Tsardom.[2] Thus there is a sect of
wanderers whose members may never tarry more than three days in any
one place, nor carry any baggage with them in their life-long
peregrinations; a sect of religious Nihilists; a numerous sect
composed of fanatics who mutilate themselves (Skoptsy) most cruelly,
earn their livelihood very {203} often as money-changers, help each
other generously, and leave their wealth to worthy public charities;
a widely spread sect of men and women (Khlysty) who pray together,
join hands and dance together, and then extinguish the lights and
give themselves up to wild orgies.... There were suicidal sects of
which the earliest had many adepts in the north and centre of Russia,
and whose cardinal dogma was salvation by means of the "baptism of
fire and water." Hundreds of members of this fanatical sodality
cheerfully burned themselves alive, chanting pious hymns or shouting
alleiujah as they died. Most Russian sects[3] were founded by
ignorant men or women who felt disgusted with the emptiness or the
evils of life, heard the call of divine grace, and formed the
resolution to live for God, but who together with these moral and
religious strands invariably twisted some of their own weaknesses or
vices and produced a curious cord which linked them to the earth or
to the nether regions sometimes more closely and more firmly than to
heaven.
Rasputin's propensities lay in the direction of the Khlysty, but that
he was ever formally initiated into that community, as some of his
enemies maintain, there is no evidence to show. Nor is it of moment
to decide whether he received the impulse from without. Religious
history and psychology teach us that mysticism and sensuality are
never very far apart. As concupiscence was the main source of his
own fall from grace, he not unnaturally generalised and taught that
that was the one deadly sin against which the true Christian's
exertions should be unceasingly directed. But the Khlysty's method
he propounded harmonised with his vicious proclivities and reminds me
of the answer once made by a bright Sunday-school child who, when
catechised by the Roman Catholic priest as to what one must do in
order to benefit by the sacrament of penance, made answer, "You must
first go and commit sin, your reverence." That was exactly the
doctrine propagated by Rasputin, who maintained that salvation can be
achieved only by repentance, and {204} that in order to repent
efficaciously it behoves one first to sin. Like the Khlysty, whose
sect his own little congregations resembled, he taught that every act
of contrition in common must be preceded by the commission of sin in
common.
Incontinence being the predominant vice against which a Christian
must struggle, the means of combating it were thus unfolded by
Rasputin as they had been taught by the Khlysty. They commended
themselves to the sensual mind of the teacher who, in these tenets,
perceived an easy way of associating his inveterate vice with
godliness, while the simple souls who gathered around him as their
saviour were amazed at the ease and pleasure with which they could
qualify for the Kingdom of Heaven.
But the hard-headed male peasants of Pokrovskoye received the stones
of Rasputin's marvellous gifts of prophecy, healing, and second sight
with the scepticism which is part of their upbringing; whereas the
hearts of the women were touched, their faith was assured, their zeal
was inflamed. They bruited abroad the tidings of the new prophet,
whose reputation soon spread to the neighbouring villages and towns.
From time to time the curious and the pious came to converse with him
and returned impressed, some with his eccentricity, others with his
sanctity, all with his personality.
It would be rash to assert that, at this transitional period of his
career, Rasputin's attempts to form a sect were inspired by motives
wholly foreign to what went by the name of religion. True he was a
man of excitable temperament, strong passions, possessed by one
ungovernable vice, and devoid of a moral standard. But he was
profoundly dissatisfied with his former way of living, and without
perhaps analysing too closely the specific causes of his
dissatisfaction he was sincerely desirous of entering into continuous
relations with the Unseen. He had knowledge of some religious
denominations in which depravity, in particular that form of it to
which he himself had so long been a slave, was ingeniously grafted on
piety and the strange mixture provided with a sanction termed divine.
Thus he had met with sectarians who, persuaded that to the pure in
spirit all things {205} are clean and may be made holy, had adopted
and hallowed practices which are penalised by the criminal law. And
to a mind steeped, as his had been, in moral uncleanness, and twisted
by fanatical delusions, it may well have seemed conceivable that
antinomianism in sexual morality is compatible with and even
conducive to true religion. He assured me that that was his
conviction and his accents were sincere. I have met with other
fanatics in Russia who held, preached, and practised these tenets and
appeared not only never to feel a qualm of remorse or a twinge of
misgiving, but to enjoy a calm of conscience which the truly
religious often lack. And they were ready to undergo the severest
pains and penalties rather than abandon the faith or swerve from the
conduct which they ascribed to divine revelation. It is not easy for
Westerns who have not lived among such people and become thoroughly
conversant with their perverted modes of thought to weigh their
motives and impulses and determine the parts played by semi-conscious
self-deception, by fanatical delusions, and by hypnotic suggestion.
I feel strongly that beneath the coarseness and selfishness of such a
man's outer life and his vulgar histrionic demeanour one may fairly
admit the possibilities of mystic stirrings and spiritual aspirations.
The seeds sown by Rasputin fell on grateful soil, the Russian psyche
being prone to mysticism, and he soon attained the status of local
saint. Peasant women journeyed to Pokrovskoye, bringing with them
the halt, the blind, the sick, and, above all, those who were
"possessed by demons"--a class still deemed numerous in the Russia of
to-day. Rasputin treated some, with results which were thought to be
miraculous, and declared that others were being tried by God and must
bear their cross or respond cheerfully to the summons calling them to
another life. His power over the spirits of evil was thus
recognised, at first by women, and these enabled him to found a
congregation of "Sisters"--the nucleus of a sect. Now and again he
would leave this flock, retire into the forest for several days to
commune with the deity, with whom his relations were becoming more
{206} direct and intimate, and then return with a brighter halo to
the little community. Possessing by this time a house of his own, he
had an apartment turned into a small chapel where religious exercises
were carried on. He also dug a deep cellar on the ground floor into
which he daily went down, remaining there for hours in prayer and
meditation, wrestling, as he said, with the devil, whom he vanquished
at last by dint of superhuman efforts and after many vicissitudes.
In this "dug-out" he was also wont to sleep.
For a considerable period the new sect, which never openly broke with
the Orthodox Church, consisted almost exclusively of women, most of
whom were young, blooming, and comely. Among the earliest and
simplest were Katya, Dunya, Helen. More interesting than these was
Alexandra Dubrovina, the daughter of well-to-do parents, a healthy
pretty girl, brimful of spirits, whose relations with the Teacher
form a chapter apart. It was only very gradually and partially that
the scepticism of some of the men was overcome by the frequency of
Rasputin's marvellous cures and the repetition of heavenly signs and
tokens. One of the first male converts was his god-son, another was
his cousin Raspopoff, and these men by their example dispelled the
misgivings of the doubters and drew others to the new sect. For
their lives were exemplary. They had forsworn alcoholic drinks, were
eminently peaceful and law-abiding, kept regular hours, and were
honest and industrious. "By our fruits you may know us," Rasputin
said triumphantly to those of little faith who were still unconvinced.
It is characteristic of his hypnotic power over women that the
"sisters" displayed towards him the fervour of religious devotion,
intensified by the ardour of a love which tyranny, physical cruelty
of the most revolting character, and frequent causes for jealousy
were powerless to damp. One instance of this was afforded by his
relations with Alexandra Dubrovina, whose parents were in easy
circumstances and whose outlook upon life was of the brightest. This
promising girl abandoned her home and kindred to seek eternal
salvation or transient happiness in the house and under the spiritual
{207} guidance of the "saint," to whom western peoples would give a
different name. The girl became passionately attached to her teacher
although he had taken a wife five years before his conversion with
whom he was still living and was the father of three healthy
children. Setting out on a pilgrimage to the shrines of Kieff,
Rasputin took Alexandra with him, bullied her, terrorised her,
tortured her, inflicted grievous bodily harm on her, and brought her
back a mere shadow of her former self. Her mother exercising her
parental authority insisted on her returning home and refused to
allow her to resume relations with the brutal ruffian who was posing
as the spokesman of God. But the girl was not to be held back. She
insisted on the invincible necessity of ending her life with
Rasputin, for whom her affection was unbounded. She could not and
would not live without him, and declared that neither filial piety
nor bolts and bars would prevent her from carrying out her decision.
Accordingly she returned to the prophet and soon afterwards breathed
her last, whereupon her younger sister, Irene, rushed off to take her
place, was admitted as a sister, was martyrised in turn by the
sectarian, pined away, and died in a few months.[4]
In this way Rasputin took advantage of the generous, trusting impulse
of the untutored young women of the village and the province, and
impressed the coarse veinings of his degenerate nature on their
plastic souls. The seed of corruption took root and he spanned the
community of which he was the centre with an arc of light emanating
from the phosphorescence of moral rottenness. He now began to
deliver his "divine message" in clearer terms than before. "In me,"
he told his hearers, "is incarnate a particle of the Supreme Being.
I am an incarnation of God, and only through me can you hope to be
saved. And the manner of your salvation is this: You must be united
with me in soul and also in body. The virtue that goes out from me
is the source of light, the destruction of sin." Those who
assimilated this doctrine--and it was accepted by his entire
flock--had no difficulty in believing that to a mortal endowed {208}
with these privileges all things were permitted. Communion, nay
union, with him was regarded as the one road leading to eternal
happiness; and they took it cheerfully.
The liturgic ceremonies, if one may dignify with such a name the
enormities of Rasputin's sodality, were almost identical with those
of the Khlysty. "Sacrificial prayer" was the designation given to it
by the pontiff. As soon as the first star became visible in the sky
Rasputin, together with the brethren and the sisters, went down to
the underground room and piled up wood on the hearth. On a tripod in
the centre of the fire was placed a vessel filled with incense and
aromatic herbs. Each brother then took his place between two sisters
and holding hands they all formed a circle and moved slowly round the
fire, chanting as they went the sacramental formula: "Our sin is for
the sake of repentance. Sin for repentance sake, O Lord!" After a
time as the fire burned less bright the dance became quicker. Sighs,
moans, ejaculations were continuous and the pace grew ever brisker.
At last the logs would flicker and the fire would die. From out of
the darkness Rasputin's melodious voice would then be uplifted:
"Brethren, tempt your flesh." Whereupon one and all would throw
themselves on the floor and the revolting orgy began.
It was a repetition of the procedure of the Khlysty and a fresh
illustration of the recognised fact that mysticism and sensuality are
so close akin that one feels tempted to call them correlates.
When judging Rasputin and his followers for these iniquities, which
were not only repeated at regular intervals but were idealised and
hallowed as the essence of the law of God, it behoves us to remember
that a numerous sect exists and has long existed in various parts of
Russia with the same tenets and practices, while certain other
denominations are more abnormal still. Nor should it be forgotten
that Rasputin was but a Siberian boor who had acquired a slight
tincture of information and misinformation respecting the Church and
its doctrines, and was imitating others better educated than himself
who had sought to consecrate {209} their false sentiments or
predominant vices by raising them to the level of divine behests and
declaring them to be conditions of eternal salvation. Rasputin
discreetly preached his doctrine in Kazan, Saratoff, Samara, and
Kieff, and made numerous converts there, some of whom I met at
different times.
His fellow-townsmen of Pokrovskoye, aware of the nature of
"sacrificial prayer," were, with few exceptions, indignant. They had
seen some of their most promising womenfolk drawn into the seducer's
net and their lives complicated and in several cases wrecked, and
fearing that other victims might follow they cast around for means to
rid the village of the blasphemous debauchee. A formal protest was
drawn up and presented to the authorities, in which the petitioners
set forth that their daughters were being corrupted by Rasputin, and
that new-born children were being abandoned outside huts and houses.
But nothing appears to have been done by the authorities.
Meanwhile the rising light, whose fame was fast spreading, had, on
his journeys, made the acquaintance of a theologian of the Orthodox
Church and impressed him most favourably, In Moscow he was presented
to various ladies of wealth, position, title, and influence, who
marvelled at his shrewd remarks, pithy sayings, apposite similes, and
intuitive insight into character and motives, and also at his
religious discipline. His appearance in a salon was undoubtedly
striking. He would enter the room with the air of one who had
usurped an empire and was striving after the prestige requisite to an
emperor, attired in peasant's costume, and with that scrupulous lack
of cleanliness without which his garb might be deemed affected. His
presence overpowered the "lower natures" with which he came in
contact. Their will sometimes became numbed forthwith. His soft
soulful eyes catching theirs poured forth a magnetic flood which
induced passivity and soul-surrender. Even educated men of the world
like Prince Yussupoff felt its power. His non-conformity to such
social conventions as soap, water, and brushes impressed many of the
weaker vessels and intensified {210} their admiration. The Minister
of the Interior, A. N. Khvostoff, said: "He is an extraordinary
hypnotiser.... So powerful is his influence that the most
matter-of-fact police agents surrender to it in a couple of days.
Although these fellows have, so to say, passed through fire and water
we have to change them every few days because they fail under his
power.... Further, as I have said already, he can stop a flow of
blood by his spell."[5]
Mgr. Hermogen, Bishop of Saratoff, who was dismissed and sent to a
monastery through Rasputin, was one of the two men who had helped to
thrust him into the limelight of the imperial palace. The bishop
recently said:[6] "We, the representatives of the highest clergy, are
more than all others to blame for having helped him on.... It was we
who pushed him forward.... But to my thinking at the outset the
divine fire glowed in Rasputin's soul. He was imbued with a certain
internal sensibility, and I confess freely that I experienced his
influence on myself. He more than once responded to my
heart-sorrows, and in this way he conquered me, and in the beginning
of his career conquered others."
One might write a volume about the man who for some years stood
behind the throne of the Tsar and, in a very limited sense,
influenced the destiny of all the Russias, without satisfactorily
explaining to Westerns his strange career or fully accounting for his
power over people. For all the known facts are inadequate to justify
either. Nothing that Rasputin said will enable one to get at the
sources of this power, and most of the things which he is alleged to
have done seem calculated to seal them up. The well from which it
took its rise was latent, and the words that come nearest to
expressing it are personal magnetism. Rasputin's eyes were
fascinating. His tone was often soft and insinuating, and his gait
was that of one who is conscious of being the agent of a
preternatural power and needs make no apology {211} for his existence
or his acts. Self-sufficiency and superiority might be read in his
every gesture, and yet a careful observer would have noted that many
of his movements were not natural. They were vitiated by a touch of
the vulgar familiarity of the bailiff or the blackmailer. To the
every-day type of pithless mankind he communicated his own faith, and
over many society women avid of change and prone to mysticism his
sway was unbounded as that of the Pied Piper over the children of
Hamelin. His habit of mind during this first phase of his career was
a constant implicit reference to those elusive standards of mysticism
which so many Russians accept without questioning.
Rasputin took nothing for granted, not even the precepts of
Christianity. Facts were as mere potter's clay in his hands, and he
kneaded them to suit ideals which to many became idols. The law and
the prophets were construed by him as by Mohammed, to suit his
predominant passion and his changing moods, and like the devil he
could quote scripture for his purposes. For he was a law unto
himself and a prophet to the weak willed and the degenerates among
whom he lived and worked. "To the clean," I once heard him say, "all
things are clean," and misgivings, prejudices, and convictions were
dissipated by his utterances; yet the practice which was under
discussion at the time is still brand-marked as immoral by the elite
of human kind. But Rasputin had only to put the more exacting of his
hearers under the charm of his personality to draw some of them down
to the level of his purpose. The evil proclivities of the others he
supplied with divine sanction, transforming moral perversion into a
virtue. Reasoned discipline was loosened at his words.
One may fitly leave to Rasputin's biographer the task of following
his career through the many dreary sloughs through which he and his
followers--now the unsophisticated peasants, and later the great
ladies of and about the imperial court--went floundering. His
acquaintance with Bishop Theophan, with the priest John of Cronstadt
whose "communion" service on our journey to the Crimea I have already
sketched, and more particularly with the fiery monk {212} Iliodor and
with Bishop Hermogen stood him in good stead. At court he soon
filled the gap left by the French spiritist Philippe, for whose sake
the Tsar had exposed himself to a rebuff from President Felix Faure.
The mere touch of Rasputin's warm rough hand gently stroking the
throbbing brow dulled the sharp pain and soothed the feverish brain
of the Empress and of others. And numerous witnesses who have never
been his partisans attest that he could charm away with his
incantations the bleeding from the nose to which the heir apparent
was subject. If suffering be the direct effect of sin, was it not
permissible to give to its most efficacious cure the name of
godliness? Rasputin's hypnotic power which he thus employed to ease
the Empress' megrims and her child's frequent maladies, his prophetic
sense which enabled him to forecast the future in so far as it
concerned the imperial family, and the indissoluble way in which the
destinies of himself, the dynasty, and the Tsardom were bound
together in his sibylline utterances sank so deeply into the morbidly
impressible psyche of the Tsaritsa that she desired nothing better
than to become an organ of his will, and to have those affairs of the
Empire in which she was personally interested conducted by the light
of his intelligence. I once heard him say: "It is none of my doing
that my destiny is interwoven inextricably with that of the imperial
family. I am only the exponent, not the weaver of Fate. And what I
have said, I know." In his life, characterised by numerous
coincidences, the coming to pass of this prediction was the most
striking of all.
In Rasputin, hot, impulsive nature though he was, the self-assertion
of passion was now presumably mastered for a while by cool reason and
patient discipline, which kept him watching and waiting for the
expected coherence of time with place and opportunity. And when the
synthesis was complete he utilised it for a purpose inconceivably
puerile. But that purpose once achieved his self-discipline relaxed.
Here, as elsewhere, familiarity bred contempt, and with the growth of
his influence his precautions ceased, his predominant passions
reasserted their sways, and the {213} inspired prophet became once
more a drunken, prating debauchee, who befouled with his filthy
tongue the names not only of the persons whose honour he had robbed,
but also of the few who kept clear of dishonour. On his entry into
the world of greatness through the wicket of the Winter Palace,
Rasputin struck his mysticism several notes above the pitch to which
the august inmates of the palace were accustomed. He spurned the
tables and planchettes which had rapped or written under the
prehensile fingers of Philippe or of the two grand duchesses who were
in daily converse with the spirits of the great Beyond. Rasputin had
an invisible familiar, one of his own, and he made no secret of his
conviction that this Mentor dwelt high above the principalities and
thrones. For to some followers the Siberian peasant announced
plainly that he was the envoy--and hinted that he was also an
incarnation--of the Supreme Being, wherefore he needed no histrionic
paraphernalia to put himself in contact with his Inspirer.
Rasputin's force--the operations and effects of which faintly
outlined themselves in the annals of the dynasty--lay not so much in
himself as in the weaknesses of those who made him what he became.
It is but fair to admit, however, that he was materially aided by
circumstances which to the superstitious were evidences of his
preternatural mission. After the Empress's repeated hopes and
disappointments, he is said to have foretold with positive certitude
the birth of a son.[7] He subsequently impressed upon the lady the
conviction that his presence was an indispensable condition to the
well-being of her little Alexis, and indeed to that of the imperial
family generally. And various episodes in their lives appeared to
bear out the belief. Among the coincidences which invest the
prophet's life with the element of the fantastic were the occurrence
of mishaps whenever he was sent away from the court, and the
successful application of remedial measures followed by the
brightening of the prospect as soon as he returned. Thus it was
while {214} he was away that the heir-apparent fell ill, and in the
unanimous judgment of the physicians who attended him recovery, which
was very difficult at best, would be impossible unless the boy were
taken abroad. That meant for the Tsaritsa separation either from her
husband or from her son, both of whom she loved with all the fervour
of her strange nature. Rasputin on his return, when he learned the
lady's distress, wrote to the effect that "she must fear nothing,
take no heed of what the doctors told her, because above all doctors
is their Maker, and He announces through Rasputin's unworthy lips
that Alexis will be restored to health without journeys or
separations. She is to follow his directions and it will be done
with her according to his word." And this promise, like so many
others far more improbable, was redeemed. I saw the boy before and
after his illness, and from time to time I learned something of the
methods recommended by Rasputin and followed by the sovereigns.
These and similar "signs and tokens" impressed all who witnessed them.
He treated numbers of people for various diseases, and according to
their own account helped many in marvellous ways. The efficacy of
his incantations was believed in by all who saw him employ them.
Even Prince Yussupoff, in whose palace he was killed, admits that
Rasputin, whom he began by disliking, conquered his aversion and
eased his asthma. The Minister Khvostoff, who is accused of having
bribed two men to kill him, recognised the power of his spells.
Stolypin, too, is said to have been hypnotically healed by the mystic
after the shock he underwent when his house was blown up. That
weak-nerved women should yield to his power is hardly to be wondered
at.
I was personally acquainted with Rasputin, as I was acquainted with
nearly everybody in Russia who, in my judgment, was likely to exert
perceptible influence, open or covert, on the course of public
affairs. I could not ignore the man who had the ear of the Tsar and
Tsaritsa, who was humoured by courtiers and ministers, and seemingly
respected even by Stolypin himself. He told me some {215} things
about himself and many more--that were newer and to me more
interesting--about his religious tenets. I wrote them down at the
time and had them subsequently confirmed.
Rasputin's career in the Russian capital may be divided into two
periods, of which the longer one came largely under my personal
cognisance, while the other is known to me only from the narratives
of others, and therefore imperfectly and with gaps. The first ends
in April, 1914, when I quitted Russia together with Count Witte. The
second comprehends everything that took place between that date and
the day of Rasputin's death. During both periods the peasant-prophet
was accused of many backslidings and some crimes, and as the eminent
leader of the Octobrist party, Gutchkoff, acquired extraordinary
popularity by a tremendous onslaught in the Duma against him and
against the court that protected him, these accusations were
everywhere received as proven. It is well to remember, however, that
in political crises the haste with which damning charges are gathered
and hurled against the biggest targets that offer themselves explains
the lack of substance which so often renders them useless as
historical materials. Nor do they, as a rule, inflict very dangerous
wounds in Russia, where the line between crime and misfortune is
shadowy. As far as my knowledge went, during the first period of his
court career, Rasputin sedulously eschewed giving advice about any
matters except ecclesiastical, but in dealing with these he generally
had his way. Bishops were consecrated or transferred at his
suggestion, and he at last went so far as to have first M. Izvolsky's
brother and then M. Samarin removed from the ministerial post of
Ober-Procurator of the Most Holy Synod on grounds which I am unable
to approve.
Gutchkoff's historic attack on the man and, through him, on the
dynasty gave currency to ideas which seemed most useful to the reform
parties of the Duma at the moment, but are of no avail to the
historian. To launch the thunder-bolt of moral reprobation against a
clever histrion like {216} Rasputin was incongruous from any point of
view but the political, and even in this domain it was not free from
danger, as the sequel has shown. Even the court, which was most
directly aimed at, could contemplate it from none other. For the
disquieting side of this pseudo-spiritual movement was that it
consisted of ideas, emotions, cravings, and practices which were
widespread throughout the Tsardom, and many of which lay at the roots
of all popular religion there. One could not well condemn the Tsar,
therefore, without at the same time anathematising tens of thousands
of the intelligentsia and scores of millions of the peoples who
acknowledged his rule.
Gutchkoff's thesis was that Rasputin swayed the Tsaritsa, who ruled
the Autocrat of all the Russias, and was therefore an ignoble
deceiver and a dangerous adviser. He put it to the Duma that the
nation was in peril. I made exhaustive inquiries into the truth of
these allegations at the time, for I then had ways and means of
investigating them. But I could find no evidence that the Siberian
peasant had--with a single exception--ever interfered in any way at
any time in matters other than ecclesiastical. And continuing my
research down to April, 1914, I was forced to the conclusion that
Rasputin had only once made his influence felt in the political
domain. Only once. And then, I am bound to say, it was
superlatively beneficent. As I heard his own evidence on the subject
as well as that of cabinet ministers and court dignitaries, I have
good grounds for stating that it was Rasputin who moved the Tsar to
turn a deaf ear to the Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolayevitch, who
advocated a bellicose policy, and persuaded him to steer clear of the
war for which he had been feverishly making ready.[8] Into the
charlatan's motives for this advice I am unable to enter.
This evidence of mine offers no extenuation of Rasputin's iniquities
nor of the folly of those who connived at them. It is neither more
nor less than the statement of a fact.
{217}
During the latter period of his career, which began after my
departure from Russia, and continued until his tragic death, Rasputin
appears to have had a hand in some of the political as well as most
of the ecclesiastical changes that took place, and while giving
pastors to the Church, to have allowed the old Adam, who had
apparently died in himself at the time of his conversion, to revive
in all his pristine hideousness. A drunkard and a profligate in the
eyes of the profane, he still remained a man of God, a wonder-worker,
and a prophet to the initiated of the court circle, of which he had
now become the centre. All the reformers and most of the
parliamentary parties outside regarded him as the symbol of all that
was unjust, oppressive, and infamous in the autocracy. And this was
his real significance. He was a symbol for the anti-autocratic
parties. But apart from the utter incongruity of allowing such a
clumsy mummer to have a voice in any of the affairs of Church or
State, it has not yet been proved that his influence on the destinies
of the Empire was as profound or far-reaching as is alleged. To me
Rasputin seems to have been but one of the symptoms of the disease of
which the Tsardom was dying.
He was a reagent that united what was best in the country against the
dark powers of which he stood forth as the exponent. The Duma, the
press, the nobility, the zemstvos, were all determined to put an end
to the outrageous farce which was being enacted in the midst of a
world tragedy, and to immobilise the wire-pullers who were exploiting
it for their ends. Rasputin's career was the _reductio ad absurdum_
of the Tsarist State. It focussed multitudinous evils and seemed to
give to the many-headed bureaucracy what the Roman emperor desired
for his peoples, a single neck that might be severed at a blow.
Several plots were hatched against his life at various stages of his
career. Of these by far the most dangerous was engineered by a
single person--a jealous woman who had believed in him, lived with
him, and loved him for years, before she became the admirer of his
enemy, the monk Iliodor. One day in the streets she plunged a knife
into his {218} abdomen and narrowly escaped lynching at the hands of
his worshippers. Rasputin's wound was grievous and he lay for many
weeks in hospital, but his hale, robust nature finally pulled him
through. His fair assailant, K. Gusseva, whose hero he had been for
years, declared at the police station when charged with the crime
that he was no better than a seducer of women, and that death was
what the impostor had merited. She was sent to a madhouse. On
another occasion a conspiracy was said to have been devised by no
less a personage than the Minister of the Interior[9] whose testimony
I adduced above respecting the marvellous powers of the thaumaturge.
This responsible member of the government, who had often told his
friends that Rasputin's proper place was not with the Emperor of
Russia but with the Emperor of Heaven, is accused of having suborned
the unfrocked monk Iliodor to assassinate the Starets. It was this
same Iliodor who some years before helped to introduce Rasputin to
the court and had latterly anathematised him as a third-rate
anti-Christ. But this plot was revealed before it could be executed,
and the erring minister was restored to private life.
Around the last conspiracy which terminated the seer's career legend
has spun a web of mystery, patriotism, and romance which savours of
the Florence of the Medici. Nearly all Russia applauded the heroic
deed which sent the drunken, obscene satyr to his last account at a
banquet worthy of Lorenzo the Magnificent. This universal and
enthusiastic approval of a bloody act of treachery is, in my
judgment, one of the most characteristic traits of Russian public
opinion and sentiment. The attitude of the nation, which not only
forgave but eulogised the crime for the sake of the murderers'
supposed motives, gives one the measure of public morality and of the
rottenness of the State which could no longer exist without the help
of murder and treachery in high quarters and in low.
Strange echoes of mediæval times are awakened by Rasputin's life
story, which reminds one of the hero of {219} Calderon's Life a
Dream. The worshippers who revered him as a saint, the court ladies
who, at the end of their letters, kissed the "dear little hands and
feet" of the slovenly, unkempt satyr, the dignitaries and ministers
who sent him respectful telegrams, the bishops and archbishops who
pushed him into the limelight of the court, all knew his antecedents.
They were aware that he had been publicly flogged for horse-stealing,
that he had been arrested for rape, and that a charge of perjury was
hanging over his head. Deliberately ignoring the conclusions to be
drawn from these facts, they one and all recognised him as their
spiritual leader.
In Britain and France the public is unable to understand how the
lofty, the base, the spiritual, and the sensual can thus be
interwoven together by people endowed with reason and moral
conscience. The answer is that the Russian psyche is capable of
other syntheses even more difficult to understand than this. Who,
for instance, before the war would have believed it possible for a
Russian government of brotherhood and goodwill to make peace with the
enemy and wage war on their own brethren, to abolish capital
punishment and inaugurate indiscriminate mass massacres, to preach
universal freedom and punish expressions of opinion unfavourable to
itself, to proclaim government by the people and to chastise the
people for expressing its legitimate wishes, to lay down the right of
every nation to govern itself and to trample on the Ukrainians and
the Finns for attempting to avail themselves of the principle?
Westerns have not yet learned to understand the psychology of Russia.
Neither can they put themselves in the position of serious Russians
who, like the Minister Khvostoff and Bishop Hermogen, seem to believe
in the virtue of his incantations and the precision of his second
sight. Only Westerns of intense susceptibility, who have lived in
the country among the people and as one of the people, can come to an
understanding of their old-world mysticism which pictures our lives
as stretching before and behind us into dim regions {220} void of
time and space. It was through that medium that his countrymen
viewed Rasputin.
The strangest of the many coincidences which stamped him in their
eyes as a seer and a sorcerer was that which may be discovered
between his most audacious prophecy and the sequel to his tragic
death. He had told the Tsar and Tsaritsa, and repeated to many
others as well as to me, that his destiny was entwined with the
destinies of the Romanoffs and the Tsardom, and that his death would
bring doom and disaster to them all. And hardly was his lifeless
body thrust under the ice when the Empress was taken ill. Soon
afterwards her son and two of her daughters were seized with illness
and confined to bed. Then the sovereign was deposed, insulted,
imprisoned, the army dissolved, the Empire abolished, and mighty
Russia broken up into a number of fragmentary powerless States into
which no new life-current has entered. What ancient oracle or
prophet can point to so many fateful predictions accomplished?
Rasputin, had he been the ambitious or the calculating politician
portrayed by Gutchkoff and other parliamentary orators, would have
taken the first revelation of his power over the autocrat for an
intimation to use it to the fullest extent for the common good, or
for some great purpose of his own, and would have composed the
remainder of his career to oneness with that aim. But he did nothing
of the kind. He had no great purpose, good or evil, nothing but
insatiable thirst for coarsest pleasures of sense. He reminded me of
the Ukrainian of whom the story ran that he exclaimed, "How I should
love to be Tsar. I know what I then would do. I would steal a
hundred roubles and from early morning until late at night I would
gorge myself on bacon. Ah! if only I were Tsar!"
[1] In the Abalaksky Monastery.
[2] For years I made a study of them, intending to write a history of
Russian sects.
[3] In Russia there are sects that have come down from the earliest
ages of Christianity, and that of the Skoptsy is probably one.
[4] In the year 1908.
[5] Cf. _Byloye_, No. 1 (23), 1917, p. 60.
[6] Cf. "Bishop Hermogen and Rasputin," _Russkoye Slovo_, No. 294, p.
3, 1917.
[7] I had this from one of Rasputin's intimates and several of his
followers, not from himself.
[8] The details of this story are interesting.
[9] A. N. Khvostoff.
{221}