RA-RA RASPUTIN!
The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin – Alex de Jonge
Rasputin. Does “Russia’s greatest love machine” (to quote the Boney M song) need any further introduction? The Siberian peasant who became a prophet and healer to Russia’s imperial family certainly didn’t think so, simply walloping out his legendary 11-inch penis to prove his identity when challenged. But Alex de Jonge’s book, The Life and Times of Grigorii Rasputin, reclaims Rasputin’s life from the ‘lore’ and provides a rich insight into his notorious role in Russian history in the final years of its Empire.
Historian de Jonge is half-Russian, half-British, and his grandmother’s personal acquaintance with Rasputin was a motivation for researching and writing this book, published in 1982. His descriptions of the Russian Empire are transportive... The grim realities of the Siberian peasantry from which Rasputin emerged are in stark contrast with the petulant precarity of the imperial family and the revolutionary intelligentsia that circled them. In making the case that Rasputin was an outlier, we learn of “peasant cunning” and wandering “starets” (monks or god-men), and of the powerful superstitions of dark magic such as ‘second sight’ and of “khvostitel” who, like witches, could teleport and fly at will.
But rather than pursuing mysticism and magic for personal gain, Rasputin just seems to be magical. His pilgrimage to Saint Petersburg in the early 1900s is peppered with monastic and religious encounters – what sort of ‘god-man’ he was, and whether he was a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ one, was an ongoing preoccupation for the church and court figures he crossed paths with. Rasputin held no official position in church or court, and instead it was his meeting with Tsar Nicholas II’s wife, Alexandra Feodorovna, that propelled him to power. He became a cherished friend and advisor to them both, and acted as a faith healer for their only son, Alexei Nikolaevich, who had haemophilia; a mortal threat to the imperial future.
A corrupt ruling elite’s inevitable collapse is, however, of minor interest compared to Rasputin’s bizarre and often bumbling magical escapades. Let’s start with all the shagging! Rasputin was probably wrongly rumoured to be the lover of the Tsarina (“Russian Queen”), but he was a magnet to women who sought his wisdom, healing, and raucous company. Despite having a wife and three children back home in Siberia, he often ‘tested’ his and his female disciples’ wills with ‘chaste’ sleepovers and intimate washing and grooming rituals, where resistance was the goal. The inference is that the quasi-religious ‘tests’ and ‘ordeals’ soon sunk into pure debauchery, with a handful of women complaining of abuse, but outweighed by otherwise very jolly looking female company.
Suffice to say, his drunkenness is also the stuff of legend. This book is worth reading for the account of his assassination alone. When wine laced with cyanide had little effect, his lead assassin had a crisis of faith, prompting an already inebriated Rasputin, who had foreseen his own death, to go to comfort his enemy... before being (incompetently) shot. It is as if Rasputin’s life is best savoured through an alcoholic haze; Tsar Nicholas reprimanded him on a couple of occasions due to palace politics. But – whether tending to their sick son or canoodling with his female followers – Rasputin’s reputation as a mad, drunk ‘monk’ seems pretty fair.
And so what? While he upgraded his garments and his grooming, Rasputin remained true to his peasant roots to his end – which, of course, stirred much of the resentment towards him. The analysis of the rulers he served – a boy-man king; a credulous yet too powerful queen running the country in her “invisible trousers”; and a spoilt, sickly heir to nowhere – pales next to Rasputin’s wild and mystical spirit. De Jonge certainly credits him with hypnotic mastery. A lot of his ‘healing powers’ can indeed be attributed to the power of suggestion: he provided pain relief and reassurance to Alexei and, by extension, his parents; his knowledge of folk medicine and sympathetic magic was novel and compelling; and his will and dominance could be total. I appreciated de Jonge’s care in expressing his hypnotic influence – for instance, hypnosis can’t cure haemophilia, but our author pauses to consider the nuances of positive suggestions on internal bodily functions. And he’s also clear that luck played a large role in Rasputin’s apparent miracles, too.
For me, the magic of Rasputin is in the authentic company he kept separate to palace life. He frequented Saint Petersburg nightclubs where gypsy singers, musicians and dancers held a very different kind of court. De Jonge paints a vivid picture of proud, beautiful, wild performances. As a contemporary quote puts it: “They could transcend the barest walls, warm the coldest most calculating hearts with their wizardry. They were sheer hypnosis.” One of Rasputin’s enemies described him as a true disciple of the Devil, but perhaps the enduring error of men who crave power in a crumbling dictatorship is that his ‘teachers’ were the country’s populace and that a ‘hypnotist’ is a just a channel for that energy.
De Jonge concludes the book by looking at Rasputin’s life as a story of power without responsibility. I’m not convinced Rasputin wanted either..? But a man, or any person, who puts their head above the parapet in a white patriarchal power play will, I suppose, always be judged by those standards. Rasputin’s naïve love for his country as ‘saviour of the world’ was baked into Russian identity and seems to have come second to his mystical calling. Meanwhile, whatever magic he may have possessed, his ‘clairvoyance’ as to the Russian Empire’s collapse – not to mention the assassination plots against him – strikes me as mere logic and perceptiveness. I suppose this is the distinction of a person simply being magic, rather than pursuing it and seeking to wield power for power’s sake. But history is written by the opposite perspective: that wandering stars show up with some clear single Machiavellian power play in mind and psychopathically proceed accordingly.
In reality, Rasputin emerged from the largely meaningless chaos of remote Russian peasantry only for his fate to be spurred on by the vicarious worries of a royal wife and mother as much as it was by his love of booze and babes. It is eery to be writing this at a time when America is so seized by the need to anoint various men vying for power with Brand God™️ affiliations; perhaps so much of Rasputin’s rise can be attributed to this morsel of Russian peasantry wisdom that de Jonge shares at the start of the book:
“God is on high and the tsar is a long way off.”
It implies that one should look to these forces for protection (not least for appearances sakes) while also reminding oneself, and each other, that no help, supernatural or physical, is coming. What more powerful example can Rasputin and Russia set that salvation – and real magic – never come from just one lone (and inevitably white) man. Leading out from chaos as part of something bigger than yourself is, to me, the true prophecy of Rasputin.
