Nicholas and Alexandra

A story told by Fulop-Miller, Rasputin’s biographer, indicates the strange duality of Rasputin’s nature:

“A young girl who had heard of the strange new saint came from her province to the capital and visited him in search of … spiritual instruction. His gentle monastic gaze and the plainly parted light brown hair … all at first inspired her with confidence. But when he came closer to her, she felt immediately that another quite different man, mysterious, crafty, and corrupting, looked out from behind the eyes that radiated goodness and gentleness.

“He sat down opposite her, edged quite near and his light blue eyes changed color and became deep and dark. A keen glance reached her from the corner of his eyes, bored into her, and held her fascinated. A leaden heaviness overpowered her limbs as his great wrinkled face, distorted with desire, came closer to hers. She felt his hot breath on her cheeks, and saw how his eyes, burning from the depths of their sockets, furtively roved over her helpless body, until he dropped his lids with a sensuous expression. His voice had fallen to a passionate whisper and he murmured strange, voluptuous words in her ear.

“Just as she was on the point of abandoning herself to her seducer, a memory stirred in her dimly … she recalled that she had come to ask him about God … she gradually awoke … the heaviness disappeared … she began to struggle.… He was at once aware of the increasing inner resistance, his half-shut eyes opened again, he stood up, bent over her … and pressed a passionless, gentle, fatherly kiss on her forehead. His face distorted with desire became smooth again and was once more the kindly face of the wandering teacher. He spoke to his visitor in a benevolent, patronizing tone, his right hand raised to his forehead in blessing. He stood before her in the attitude in which Christ is depicted on old Russian icons; his glance was again gentle and friendly, almost humble, and only in the depth of those little eyes still lurked, almost invisible, the other man, the sensual beast.”

Rasputin focused his eyes not only on feverish women, but on ministers of the Imperial government. At the request of the Empress, he called on and was received by two successive Prime Ministers of Russia, Peter Stolypin and Vladimir Kokovtsov.

Stolypin, a man of great strength and will, later described the visit of Rasputin to his friend Michael Rodzianko, President of the Duma: “He [Rasputin] ran his pale eyes over me, mumbled mysterious and inarticulate words from the Scriptures, made strange movements with his hands, and I began to feel an indescribable loathing for this vermin sitting opposite me. Still, I did realize that the man possessed great hypnotic power, which was beginning to produce a fairly strong moral impression on me, though certainly one of repulsion. I pulled myself together.…”

To a remarkable degree, the same scene was repeated with Stolypin’s successor, Kokovtsov: “When Rasputin came into my study and sat down in an arm chair, I was struck by the repulsive expression of his eyes,” Kokovtsov wrote. “Deep seated and close set, they glued on me and for a long time, Rasputin would not turn them away as though trying to exercise some hypnotic influence. When tea was served, Rasputin seized a handful of biscuits, threw them into his tea and again fixed his lynx eyes on me. I was getting tired of his attempts at hypnotism and told him in as many words that it was useless to stare at me so hard because his eyes had not the slightest effect on me.”

Both Stolypin and Kokovtsov departed from their interviews convinced that they, at least, had triumphed over the Siberian moujik. In fact, both had simply made more certain their own political fates. The interviews had been arranged by Alexandra so that Rasputin could evaluate the two ministers. Leaving each of them, he reported to her that neither man seemed attentive to him or to the will of God. Upon these reports, unknown to them, the palace reputations of both of these Prime Ministers, the best men that Russia had, began to decline.

Rasputin’s eyes were the foundation of his power, but when they failed him, he was quick to use his wheedling tongue.

   The rise of Gregory Rasputin would have been impossible in any country other than Russia. Even in Russia, pungent, shaggy, semi-literate peasants did not normally take tea with prime ministers. Yet neither Kokovtsov nor Rasputin considered the scene quite as bizarre as it seems today; it was not, as someone put it, “as if Og had entered the White House.”

Rasputin appeared in St. Petersburg as a starets—a Man of God who lived in poverty, asceticism and solitude, offering himself as a guide to other souls in moments of suffering and turmoil. Sometimes, as in his case, the starets might also be a strannik—a pilgrim who carried his poverty and his offerings of guidance in wanderings from place to place. These were types that all Russians could recognize. Through Russian history, armies of impoverished pilgrims had walked across the steppes from village to village and monastery to monastery, living on whatever the peasants or monks might choose to give them. Many ascetics walked barefoot in the winter or wrapped their legs with heavy chains. Some preached, others claimed powers of healing. If the Orthodox Church caught them preaching heresy, they went to prison, but their poverty and self-sacrifice often made them seem holier than the local priests.

All Russians listened to these holy men. To illiterate peasants who had never walked beyond the nearest river, they talked of mighty cities, foreign lands, mysterious healings and miracles of God. Even educated Russians treated them with respect. Dostoyevsky wrote in The Brothers Karamasov, “The starets is he who takes your soul and will and makes them his. When you select your starets, you surrender your will. You give it to him in utter submission, in full renunciation.” Before his death, Count Leo Tolstoy visited the revered starets of Optina Poustin for counsel. Traditionally, the rags, the chains, the clear renunciation of the world gave these men freedoms that others lacked. They could rebuke the mighty, sometimes even the tsars themselves.

Rasputin was a fraudulent starets. Most were saintly old men who had left all temptation and worldly goods behind. Rasputin was young, he was married and had three children, and his powerful friends later bought him the grandest house in his village. His mind was impure and his moral behavior was gross. But he had in lavish abundance some of the dramatic trappings of holiness. Along with his burning eyes, he had a fluent tongue. His head was filled with Scriptures, and his deep, powerful voice made him a compelling preacher. Besides, he had wandered the length and breadth of Russia and twice made pilgrimages to the Holy Land. He presented himself as a humble penitent, a man who had sinned greatly, been forgiven and commanded to do God’s work. It was a touching symbol of his humility, people said, that he kept the nickname “Rasputin” which he had earned as a young man in his native village. “Rasputin” in Russian means “dissolute.”

Rasputin was born Gregory Efimovich, the son of Efim, a farmer who once had been a coachman in the Imperial Mail. The year was 1872; thus he was thirty-three when he first met the Imperial family, and forty-four when he died. His birthplace was Pokrovskoe, a village on the Tura River in western Siberia, 250 miles east of the Ural Mountains. It was a hard, wind-swept land where the temperature in winter dropped to forty below zero and to survive took great strength and hard physical work. Climate and isolation had their effect on the mind, and more mystics, more holy men and more outlandish sects came out of Siberia than any other part of Russia.

There is a story that, as a boy, Gregory uttered his first startling bit of prophecy. He lay in bed with fever while a group of villagers gathered in his father’s house to discuss the theft of a horse. From his bed, the story goes, Gregory arose, flushed and excited, and pointed his finger at a peasant in the room, declaring that he was the thief. Outraged, the peasant denied it, and Gregory was beaten. That night, however, a pair of distrustful villagers followed the accused man and saw him take the horse from his shed into the forest. Gregory acquired a modest local reputation as a seer, a heady thing for a boy of twelve.

As a young man, the seer became a rake. He drank and fought and made free with the village girls. He became a wagoner, carrying goods and passengers to other villages, an occupation that extended the range of his conquests. A good talker, sure of himself, he tried every girl he met. His method was direct: he grabbed and started undoing buttons. Naturally, he was frequently kicked and scratched and bitten, but the sheer volume of his efforts brought him notable success. He learned that even in the shyest and primmest of girls, the emptiness and loneliness of life in a Siberian village had bred a flickering appetite for romance and adventure. Gregory’s talent was for stimulating those appetites and overcoming all hesitations by direct, good-natured aggression.

On one of his trips, Gregory—now dubbed Rasputin by his snickering neighbors—carried a traveler to the monastery of Verkhoturye, a place used both as a retreat for monks and as a seat of ecclesiastical imprisonment for heretical sectarians. Rasputin was fascinated by both groups of inhabitants and remained at the monastery for four months.

Most of those confined at Verkhoturye were members of the Khlysty, a sect which believed in reaching God