THE PEASANT MOST LIKELY TO EVOLVE INTO A MANICHAEAN MESSIAH

Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith - Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2016)

*This post is dedicated to Karen, whose morbid fascination mirrors my own*

Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith is just under seven-hundred pages long. It is a veritable weapon. While I was reading this fantastically dark examination of the man blamed for the fall of the Romanovs, a single sentence kept rising to the surface of my subconscious: it was Kathryn, on the couch, with the biography…

Don’t let the considerable heft of this book intimidate you. The length of Smith’s narrative underscores the inexplicable nature of Rasputin, a man whose cultural immortality seems to feed upon prevailing anxieties. The arch of Rasputin’s life does not make sense, but that is exactly why he became the catalyst of revolution. It was his frustrating intangibility that undermined the authority of the last tsar. The people of Russia—peasants and nobles alike—simply could not understand why Nicholas and Alexandra clung to this filthy, hollow-eyed pilgrim while their empire crumbled around them. Why did the tsarina sacrifice her family and the respect of her people for such an odious creature? Over and over Smith describes deputations sent to the empress to beg her to abandon her ‘friend.’ Even when pornographic cartoons depicting Rasputin and the empress began to circulate, she refused to part with him. This narrative pattern makes for a slow and excruciating read, and leads the reader to the inevitable conclusion that this could have been avoided. This painful cycle of frustration also indicates that the length of Smith’s book was a deliberate (and intelligent) choice. Only by dragging his readers through seven-hundred pages of infuriating behavior and stubborn loyalty on the part of the Russian royals can Smith replicate in his readers the confusion and estrangement felt by the Russian people during the first two decades of the twentieth-century. We are aggravated and exhausted by the countless episodes of senseless obstinance, which could not be fully appreciated in a shorter text. Whether intentionally or not, Rasputin created a gulf between the tsar and his subjects; he became a symbol of imperial folly and a vicarious target at which to vent slanderous revolutionary sentiments. By choosing this mysterious figure over the people of Russia, Nicholas and Alexandra surrendered their power and allowed their reputations to plummet to earth and be dragged through the mud. Rasputin, by his proximity to the throne, revealed the Tzar to be a flawed and ordinary man, capable of sin and foolishness—a man who might be deposed without the certainty of divine punishment. 

Rasputin has always been an enigmatic figure. What many modern readers don’t realize is that he was as elusive during his life as he is today. He carried about him the stench of a corrupt immortality, a supernatural charge that distinguished him from the fleshy mortal beings of the earth. His enemies referred to him as the ‘Holy Devil’—an accurate summation of his conflicting characteristics. He was both irresistible and repulsive, and the people he came into contact with were either instantly intoxicated, or mystified by his power over their friends and family. Rasputin was a magnet, and his reputation changed dramatically depending on the ‘charge’ of each individual he encountered. Writes Smith, 

It was said that this man belonged to a bizarre religious sect that embraced the most wicked forms of sexual perversion, that he was a phony holy man who had duped the emperor and empress into embracing him as their spiritual leader, that he had taken over the Russian Orthodox Church and was bending it to his own immoral designs, that he was a filthy peasant who managed not only to worm his way into the palace, but through deceit and cunning was quickly becoming the true power behind the throne. This man, many were beginning to believe, presented a real danger to the church, to the monarchy, and even to Russia itself. 

Anyone who has ever fallen in love with the world constructed by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin and Blok will understand the draw of imperial Russia. The heady imagery that defines these narratives cannot be found in any other canon. Part of this has to do with climate—the harsh desolation of Siberia calls for a distinct vocabulary and tone. While previous monarchies (here I am thinking of France before 1789) may have exacerbated public grievances with extravagant displays of wealth, the sheer size of the Russian peasantry and the immeasurable material distance between the wealthy and the poor elevated the drama of the Russian experience to an unprecedented degree. St. Petersburg was an endless tapestry of juxtaposed images—beggars shuffling along in front of colossal palaces, rampant starvation alongside sumptuous feasts—each image so vivid and intense as to appear almost technicolor. The mass hysteria and paranoia saturating Russia at this time embellished ordinary men with mythic, quasi-religious attributes. Writes Smith, 

The life of Rasputin is one of the most remarkable in modern history. It reads like a dark fairy tale. An obscure, uneducated peasant from the wilds of Siberia receives a calling from God and sets out in search of the true faith, a journey that leads him across the vast expanse of Russia for many years before finally bringing him to the palace of the tsar. The royal family takes him in and is bewitched by his piety, his unerring insights into the human soul, and his simple peasant ways. Miraculously, he saves the life of the heir to the throne, but the presence of this outsider, and the influence he wields with the tsar and tsaritsa angers the great men of the realm and they lure him into a trap and kill him. Many believed that the holy peasant had foreseen his death and prophesied that should anything happen to him, the tsar would lose his throne. And so he does, and the kingdom he once ruled is plunged into unspeakable bloodletting and misery for years. 

The young heir Alexei suffered from hemophilia, a genetic disorder inherited from his maternal great-grandmother, Queen Victoria of England. Had he been born a century later, his mother and father might never have depended upon a dubious figure like Rasputin for help. However, at the time of Alexei’s birth, very little was known about the sinister disease plaguing the royal families of Europe—a disease kept alive by the accustomed practice of inbreeding. When the only son of the ruling tsar was diagnosed, panic descended upon the royal palace. Compounded with this was the sudden and disorienting spiritual crisis surging through Russia. Questions and insecurities abounded, and an equal number of prophets and messiahs appeared to provide answers and salvation. Smith contextualizes the bizarre faith of the Nicholas and Alexandra when he writes, 

The restless spiritual seeking of the fin de siècle was a pan-European phenomenon. Much of this can be explained by the declining influence of the church, and institutionalized religion in general, throughout the West, but there were other specific domestic factors that lent a greater urgency to this spiritual searching in Russia. Beginning with the end of serfdom in 1861 and stretching into the early years of the twentieth century, Russia, arguably more so than any of the countries of Europe, was experiencing rapid and profoundly unsettling change as a traditional, agricultural society tried to modernize practically overnight. Along with this enormous transformation, the shattering defeat in the Russo-Japanese War followed by the Revolution of 1905 that shook the old order to its foundations left Russians with an inescapable sense of alienation, foreboding, and imminent crisis. The old institutions, and the old beliefs that went with them, no longer seemed adequate to address the troubling questions of a new and, to many, uncertain and frightening world. 

Wealthy Russians and peasants alike were anxious for guidance in this strange and transient world. Many saviors presented themselves to the wandering masses, but it was their fate to be ridiculed as soon as they were admired. The Russian press, newly released from the oppressive fetters of censorship, dissected these hopeful apostles with vicious gossip and unrelenting scrutiny. The circle of notable Russians was relatively small, and the public took obsessive care to analyze and follow every outsider the nobility accepted into their exclusive ranks. Unfortunately, once the principal family in Russia embraced him as their own personal messiah, Rasputin stepped directly into the role of the despised ‘royal favorite.’ Describing a pattern that will be familiar to history buffs, Shakespeare enthusiasts, and Lord of the Rings fans everywhere, Smith defines the ‘favorite’ as:

The shadowy advisor with the ear of the ruler, often an outsider with no connections to the political-social elites and frequently with no official position, has been a reoccurring figure throughout history…Favorites were invariably perceived as cunning and manipulative, the wicked hidden hand behind the throne. Favorites were depicted as two-faced, deceitful, ambitious and obsequious in the self-abasing struggle for power…To insiders, their place alongside the ruler was seen as a usurpation of the proper state officials and institutions; to outsiders, the range of their power assumed fancifully grotesque proportions and every government mistake was laid at their feet.

By examining the root cause of anti-Rasputin hostility—the unconscious prejudices and jealousies fueling malicious gossip—Douglas Smith portrays his subject as a man demonized by those who thought a lowly peasant unworthy of acclaim, and harassed by a paranoid army of politicians, church fathers, and journalists determined to discredit him even if it meant fabricating evidence. The unfortunate truth is that we will never know whether Rasputin had one or two faces. He was, and continues to be, an enigmatic specter, crouching in the shadows behind the doomed throne of imperial Russia. Perhaps our continuing fascination is evidence that we too are guilty of heaping the sins of an entire establishment onto the back of a single man. Ambiguous in its conclusions, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, is an excellent investigation into the power of belief, and the danger of mass hysteria. 

Douglas Smith author website

Evening Standard Review

NYT book review