TL;DL: Rasputin

Hey everyone,

I am still on vacation (currently in Morocco!) but Niko has put together another Too Long; Didn’t Listen to cover Rasputin. Thanks in part to the Boney M song, he’s remember as Russia’s greatest love machine and the seducer of the Russian queen, but are the allegations true? Perhaps Rasputin was an innocent in all this, a saintly fall guy for the elite who smeared him during the Russian Revolution? Certainly this is what modern Russian nationalist historians would have us believe, but the truth is probably murkier. Listen to the full episode for all the details, or check out the TL;DL for a quick overview.

Early Life and Pilgrimage: 

• Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was born and grew up in Pokrovskoe, Siberia on January 9, 1869 to a peasant family.

  • We don’t know much about his early life, with lots of rooms for myth-making and speculation. 

  • He was illiterate throughout his childhood and well into his adult life. 

• In 1886 he met Praskovya Dubrovina. They married in February of 1887, and she remained devoted to him throughout her life. 

  • They had seven children together and three that lived to adulthood: Dmitry, Maria, and Varvara.

• In 1897, at 28, Rasputin went on a pilgrimage after a midlife crisis. 

• After a supposed vision of the Virgin Mary, Rasputin became a strannik, a religious pilgrim who wanders about, often in fetters, begging for food and preaching from their own personal experience of Christianity, not necessarily the Bible.

• Rasputin traveled to Verkhoturye, in the Ural Mountains, to study with many starets (church elders), and learned about theology and religion from Makary, a holy monk. 

• Rasputin continued his wandering and pilgrimages, visiting home every couple of months to visit his wife and children. 

  • He traveled widely among many walks of life and developed a deep knowledge of human psychology as well as a talent for reading people. He became popular within his community for being attuned to the needs of others and began to collect acolytes of his own.  

Russia at the turn of the Century:

• Russia at the end of the 19th century was industrializing at a breakneck pace, and traditions of government and Nicholas II, the tsar, and Alexandra, the tsarina, were ill equipped to meet the change and handle new demands. 

• Alexandra gave birth to four daughters in a row—Olga, Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia—which some interpreted as God’s sign that the tsar’s time was ending because they couldn’t produce a male heir. 

• In 1905, a revolution transformed Russia from an absolutist monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, establishing an elected legislative body called a Duma, which Nicholas hated because he had been raised to believe in autocratic principles. 

  • The revolution established freedom of the press. 

• During this time, the lower classes by new Spiritualism. The wave of occultism and obsession with the supernatural was a symptom of the eroding trust in Christian religious domination and mixing with Christian ritual. 

  • Many elites did not participate but were still fascinated. 

  • When Rasputin arrived in St. Petersburg, people were primed to accept him. 

• Desperate to produce a male heir, Alexandra was particularly vulnerable to this new Spiritualism and kept occultist and mystics at court. 

• On July 30, 1904, Alexandra gave birth to Alexei Romanov, the heir to the tsar.

• The family soon discovered Alexei had hemophilia, and he was kept under intense supervision to protect his health. 

Arrival in St. Petersburg: 

• In 1904, Rasputin traveled to Kazan and met the father superior of the Seven Lakes Monastery and Archimandrite Andrei, who encouraged Rasputin to travel to St. Petersburg. 

  • This trip includes some of the first documentation of questionable meetings alone with women, including taking young ladies to the city’s bathhouses. 

  • This meeting also attached Rasputin’s name to the Khlyst sect, who supposed had orgies as part of religious ceremony. 

• Through the Archimandrite Feofan and the “Black Princesses,” Rasputin met Nicholas II and Alexandra. The Royal couple were emotionally fragile and eager to accept anyone who could comfort them instead of challenge them. 

  • For Nicholas and Alexandra, Rasputin represented the “real” Russia because he was a peasant and spoke of how the people loved the tsar and hated the politicians.