Grigory Rasputin(1869-1916)
Gregory Rasputin was one of Russia's most controversial and mysterious
figures who posed as a "holy man" and destroyed the political image and
reputation of Russia's Emperor
Tsar Nicholas II and his family through
a series of political manipulations, disgusting scandals and treachery,
provoking a huge wave of public anger and helping the communists to
prepare the disastrous Russian revolution. His mysterious activity is
still disputed by historians and religious authors, mostly because he
left no papers or documents with the exception of a few messages, while
acting behind-the-scenes inside the Palaces of the Russian Tsars, and
he remained inaccessible to public because of the heavy security that
surrounded the Russian Imperial family.
He was born Gregory Efimovich Rasputin in 1869 into a Russian peasant
family in Pokrovskoye village, Tobolsk province in Siberia. He was the
only surviving child of Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin and Anna Vasilevna
Rasputina--their four previous children died before he was born. The
family name, Rasputin, has a negative connotation, similar to
"ill-behaved" or "ill-aimed". His mother died when Rasputin was young
and his father was imprisoned for some time. Gregory had very little
schooling and was unable to read or write. At age 16 he was arrested
for theft, and the citizens of Pokrovskoe appealed to the authorities
to excommunicate and exile him. Rasputin was sentenced to three months
in prison, which was later commuted to serving his term at Verkhoturye
Monastery in Siberia. Rasputin settled with the lonely monk Makariy,
who lived in a rugged hut and practiced rituals akin to ancient
shamanic and tribal traditions of the Siberian people. Rasputin
mentioned that Makariy had cured him of a severe sleep disorder and
trained him to practice hypnotism and a vegetarian lifestyle, which
included some alcohol and also the use of various weeds and drugs for
"spiritual transformation" according to ancient shamanic rituals.
Rasputin stated later that he modeled himself after Makariy. At that
time he became interested in manipulating people through their
weaknesses and beliefs, including use of their personal and social
habits as well as their politics and religion. He was also introduced
to the banned mystical sect of Khlysty (flagellants), whose had a
strong sexual content among other exotic practices. Rasputin evolved
into a cynical and ruthless manipulator who practiced his principle
that "any sin shall make me a holy man" and was spreading his beliefs
around. In 1889 Rasputin married Praskovia Feodorovna and had three
children, but left his family in Siberia and became a wanderer. He
walked across Russia on foot from Siberia to Kiev and back several
times during the 1890s, then made a pilgrimage on foot to Greece and
Jerusalem during 1901, walking back to Russia and staying in Kazan with
a local priest who gave him a letter of recommendation to St.
Peterburg, the Russian capital. He arrived in the city in 1903, and
solicited money to build a church in his home village of Pokrovskoe. In
St. Petersburg Rasputin was accommodated by none other than Father
Sergiy (who later, in 1942, was appointed by
Joseph Stalin the Head of Orthodox
Christianity in the Soviet Union), who was at that time Director of St.
Petersburg Holy Academy and Seminary and also was a clandestine
political opponent of Tsar Nicholas II. At several reception parties
staged by Father Sergiy, Rasputin stunned St. Petersburg society by his
forecasts that Russia would be defeated in the Russo-Japanese war of
1904, and that the Russian navy "would sink down", which was exactly
what happened next.
Soon the Ober-Procurator of Russia, Pobedonostsev, issued a ban on
public appearances of Father Sergiy and Rasputin, declaring that
Rasputin was hiding his manipulative traits under the cover of
"holyness" and illegally declared himself an Orthodox Christian mystic.
Rasputin, however, ignored that ban and continued posing as a "prophet"
and healer. He continued his wanderings as a self-proclaimed "holy
man", often using lies and hypnotism to intimidate people into
submission and then used them for his own goals. He made loose
affiliations with various monasteries, then appointed himself a
religious "elder" in St. Petersburg. At that time mystical
interpretations of Christianity were in vogue, and official Orthodox
Christianity was losing its control over people amidst the
proliferation of disastrous wars and civil unrest, including
revolutions. After the failure of several "religious advisers" to bring
peace into the seriously dysfunctional Russian royal family of Tsar
Nicholas II, Rasputin was summoned by Anna Vyrubova and the famous
ascetic mystic, Father Theofan, the religious adviser to the royal
family. In October of 1905 Father Sergiy and Father Theofan arranged
Rasputin's introduction to the royal household through some relatives
of reigning Romanov family. Rasputin instantly found a way to use the
weaknesses and insecurities of Crown Prince
Aleksey Nikolaeyvitch Romanov,
whose incurable illness--he was a hemophiliac, having inherited the
disease from his grandmother, Britain's
Queen Victoria--was the main concern of
the royal family. Rasputin convinced the Empress,
Tsarina Alexandra, that he could
improve the health of young Crown Prince Aleksey. Both Tsar Nicholas II
and his wife were devastated and demoralized by their son's illness,
and their anxiety and desperation was used by Rasputin, and the people
behind him, in a crafty way to achieve goals that suited their
political agenda.
At the same time Tsar Nicholas was warned by his loyal prime minister,
Count Stolypin, that Rasputin was a dangerous fraud who could become a
threat to the royal family and to Russia. However, at Tsar Nicholas'
insistence, Stolypin had a private meeting with Rasputin. Not long
afterward Stolypin was assassinated by a hired terrorist, and the
resulting investigation by the authorities was stopped order of the
Emperor. Stolypin's records revealed that he had an argument with
Rasputin, but he was stopped and intimidated by the hypnotic stare of
Rasputin's piercing eyes. Stolypin and many other political figures of
that time had documented that Rasputin had "satanic eyes" and he was
possessed of a powerful and hypnotic glare that he used to intimidate
and cow his enemies. Rasputin also often used verbal abuse and
intimidation, including the most foul profanities--a practice
considered shocking in the rarefied air of the Russian court--to
intimidate and manipulate people into submission. At the height of his
political influence, Rasputin was constantly guarded by six agents
provided by the Russian security service by order of Tsarina Alexandra.
Also by the Imperial order Rasputin was given a new name, Novykh,
meaning the "new man", an exclamation attributed to the suffering boy,
Crown Prince Aleksey.
Rasputin apparently persuaded both the Empress and her ailing son to
ensure that he kept a permanent presence in the tsar's palaces, and he
was appointed to an official court position as "personal healer" to
Crown Prince Aleksey Nikolaeyvitch Romanov. Rasputin may had some
limited beneficial effect on Prince Aleksey's condition through
hypnotism, but it apparently was enough to convince both the Empress
and the Prince to depend more and more on Rasputin's presence and his
hypnotic abilities. Rasputin also insisted that real medical doctors
should be kept away from Alexey, constantly telling the family, "Don't
let the doctors bother him, let him rest." On the occasions when
Aleksey's health had actually improved, Rasputin used the opportunity
to take personal credit for the Prince's "improvement", thereby
solidifying his control over access to the royal family.
The Empress became a patron of Rasputin, who soon established himself
as an extremely powerful figure within the Russian court. The Emperor
was calling Rasputin a "holy man" and referred to him as "our friend".
Rasputin referred to the Emperor and the Empress only as "papa" and
"mama" and always used a frank and "sincere" tone in conversations with
the royal family. Meanwhile, government security sources reported about
wild orgies at the many parties and gatherings at Rasputin's residence,
located just a few blocks away from the Tsar's palace and paid for out
of the Russian Treasury. Rasputin's drinking binges were reported as
"massive and wild" that often degenerated into drunken and violent sex
orgies, designed to entangle politicians and other guests who could
prove useful to Rasputin's ambitions. He aggressively indoctrinated his
victims by using, among other methods, his motto "Sin that you may
obtain forgiveness!", which was in line with the views he learned from
the sect of Khlysty.
Soon Rasputin and people behind him succeeded in using his influence to
entangle many politicians in scandals, including dirty manipulations
involving their wives, drinking parties, promiscuity, and massive
embezzlement of the government funds during the First World War, by
diverting money to special interests through insiders within the
Treasury of Russia. Rasputin also manipulated the Empress
Tsarina Alexandra to make
controversial political appointments, which led to a bitter divide
within all classes of the Russian society, causing a blow to the public
image of the Imperial House of the Romanovs. Rasputin's manipulative
activities provoked many conflicts within the Russian government and
the Russian military command during the First World War. Rasputin was
using his position inside the Tsar's Palace to directly interfere with
Tsar's communications with the government and media, thus undermining
the Tsar's public image. At several times Rasputin was able to
interfere with the Tsar's schedule of meetings with political figures
as well as military commanders during the war.
In 1914, while visiting a church in Siberian city of Tobolsk, Rasputin
was attacked by his former prostitute-friend, Khionia Guseva, who then
turned a religious disciple of monk Iliodor. Ms. Guseva approached
Rasputin with a knife and wounded him in the stomach, but he recovered
from the wound and soon gained an even stronger influence on the
Empress Tsarina Alexandra. Later Ms.
Guseva said to the Grand Jury that she acted in clear mind and full
understanding that "Rasputin is the Antichrist harmful to the people of
Russia." However she was declared insane and was forcefully placed in
an asylum in Siberia. Rasputin's most destructive actions were
committed in 1916, when he convinced the
Tsar Nicholas II to move from the
Russian capital, St. Petersburg, to the front-lines in Belarus, leaving
the Empress Alexandra alone under his influence and in charge of
internal politics of the country. In absence of the Tsar, St.
Petersburg was surreptitiously over-taken by the revolutionary
communists, who penetrated into many regiments of the Army, the Navy,
as well as into the local political circles in the capital of Russia,
thus preparing for the Communist Revolution of 1917. The decade of
Rasputin's destructive manipulations led to irreparable political and
economic damage and caused a bitter divide within the government and
military command, as well as within all social layers of Russia. At
that time the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue made a record that
the "Russian Empress is mystically devoted to Rasputin."
Communist leader Vladimir Lenin wrote, "monstrous
Rasputin is pushing the Tsar's regime to a disaster", which was helping
the communist revolution. According to historians Rasputin was used by
a secret group behind the communist revolutionaries, which acted to
destroy the Romanov dynasty and the monarchy, and eventually fulfilled
their plans and came to power through revolution. That explained how
and why Rasputin was manipulated to discredit the royal family and
personally the Tsar Nicholas II.
Rasputin's main handler was a St. Petersburg's underworld drug lord,
named Dr. Badmayev, who controlled Rasputin through his drug addiction
and often instructed Rasputin about his political moves. Rasputin often
stayed overnight after having a fix at Dr. Badmayev's home in St.
Petersburg. At the same time, Rasputin's hypnotic influence over the
Empress Alexandra and the Crown Prince Alexey remained very strong,
allowing him to make political, ecclesiastical and military
appointments for those who served his interests. Rasputin created and
used public scandals and rumors about his sexual and alcoholic
excesses, and designed crafty entrapments for many members of the
Russian political establishment into orgies and scandals for immediate
blackmail and exploitation. He polarized the society by using his
political influence in securing the appointments and dismissals of
several military commanders and government ministers during the First
World War. Rasputin's abuse of power and his notorious debauchery was
used by the communist propaganda to depict Rasputin with the Empress
Alexandra in numerous pornographic comics, drawings and provocative
publications as part of a massive negative publicity campaign against
the House of Romanovs and the Russian monarchy. In the communist
propaganda Rasputin was shown as a peasant who turned the Russian Tsar
into a wimp, so the country was in "bad hands" and "proletarians must
join with peasants to overthrow the monarchy and take power", so
declared the communist leader Vladimir Lenin, who
in turn was secretly financed by the German military.
In 1916, during the most difficult time in the First World War,
brothers of Tsar Nicholas II obtained
evidence that Rasputin was secretly negotiating a peace treaty with
Germany while Russia's position in the war was not good. Rasputin said
on record that "too many peasants were dead because of the war",
indicating his agenda to settle "peace at any cost" which was also in
line with the communist propaganda, and helped the German Armies.
Peasants deserted from the Russian Army by hundreds of thousands, then
armed peasants came to St. Petersburg and joined the communist
revolutionary brigades. Rasputin's secret activity and his contacts
with the Germans became a political scandal. Tsar's cousin, Grand
Prince Nicholas, announced that he wants to hang Rasputin for treachery
as a spy in German employ, albeit Rasputin was under the protection of
the Empress Tsarina Alexandra, who
herself was German. That led to a plot by a group of aristocrats, led
by Prince Feliks Yusupov, a relative of
the Tsar, to assassinate him, but Rasputin was officially guarded by
six agents from the Russian Imperial Security under constant
supervision of specially assigned officers who lived in Rasputin's
house in St. Petersburg.
In November of 1916, Prince Yusupov pretended that he had chest pains
and obtained a high recommendation to become a patient of Rasputin.
Prince Feliks Yusupov made several visits
to Rasputin as a patient and soon he made friends with Rasputin and
presented him a picture of his wife, beautiful Princess Irene Yusupov,
niece of the Emperor Tsar Nicholas II.
Rasputin immediately became horny and expressed his desire to meet the
beauty. On December 16, 1916, Prince Yusupov and his fellow officers
designed a plan centered on using the beautiful Princess Irina Yusupov,
as a bait. On December 29, 1916, Prince
Feliks Yusupov personally invited
Rasputin to a dinner and drove him to Yusupov's Moika Palace in St.
Petersburg. There Rasputin was waiting for the appearance of the
Princess Irina Yusupov, but she never showed up. Meanwhile, Rasputin
was plied with wine and food that had been laced with cyanide, albeit
the plotters were oblivious to the fact of chemistry that cyanide is
often neutralized by some ingredients in food, as it turns into a
harmless salt in most desserts and wines. Rasputin also had a condition
with hyper-acidity and post-surgical stomach problems which caused him
to minimize his intake of sugar and alcohol. When the poison had no
apparent effect on Rasputin, Prince
Feliks Yusupov pulled out his gun and
fired, but Rasputin's life was saved because the first bullet was
reflected by the hard metal button on his coat, he was wounded, but
still managed to jump up and tried to escape out of the Moika Palace.
Then Prince Yusupov and Count Vladimir Purishkevich together with their
friend, British intelligence officer Oswald Rayner, pulled out their
guns and fired at Rasputin, then, noticing that he was still trying to
get up, they clubbed him into submission. In the early morning of
December 30, 1916, members of the plot wrapped Rasputin and dragged him
into the icy waters until he finally drowned in the Neva River.
Even after his death, Rasputin still remained dangerous and could be
used as a destructive and divisive tool, because he left a wild and
threatening message to Emperor
Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra,
predicting their death and disaster for Russia. Crown Prince Alexey
remained gravely ill and was heavily dependent and conditioned to
Rasputin's hypnotic influence. Rasputin's body was buried upon Empress
Alexandra's and Prince Alexey's request at the location in the park of
Tsarkoe Selo, near the Summer Palace of the Russian Tsars. Two months
after Rasputin's assassination, Emperor
Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, then was
arrested as citizen Romanov who was obediently sweeping snow from roads
while waiting for his sentence under supervision of communist
revolutionaries. Soon both Nicholas and Alexandra became increasingly
paranoid about having Rasputin's grave next to his Summer Palace.
Ironically, Tsar Nicholas II was under
the house arrest in that same palace during the year of 1917, and both
Empress Alexandra and Prince Alexey were not allowed to make visits to
Rasputin's grave, which was vandalized by revolutionaries in search for
valuables. By that time, Rasputin's body was removed upon the order
from Aleksandr Kerensky, the head of
the Russian provisional government, who previously was a student at the
same school and at the same time with the future communist leader
Vladimir Lenin. Initially Kerensky ordered to
remove Rasputin's body to a remote cemetery, but during the move,
Rasputin's body, masked as a piano in a wooden box, was destroyed in
the fire started by a group of revolutionaries. Shortly after the
Communist Revolution, the entire family of Tsar
Tsar Nicholas II with his wife and five
children were executed, then Tsar's Palaces were vandalized by the
revolutionary communists and Rasputin's grave was again burglarized by
poor proletarians in search for jewelery.
Later, while in emigration outside of the Communist Russia (then Soviet
Union), both accounts by Prince
Feliks Yusupov (who lived through the
1960s) and Count Vladimir Purishkevich (who died in the 1920s) were
published in their respectful books of memoirs about their plot and
assassination of Rasputin in the context of their participation in the
historic events. Prince Yusupov compared Rasputin's cynical and
manipulative treatment of the Tsar's family to the Communist Party's
ruthless methods of control over innocent people of Russia. Rasputin's
own "religious" speeches were interpreted and recorded by his enchanted
admirers and titled "holy wanderings" and "holy thoughts" when first
published in Russia in 1907 and in 1915. In 1942, Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin appointed the notorious St.
Petersburg Bishop Sergiy the Patriarch of Orthodix Christianity in the
Soviet Union. Then Patriarch Sergiy brought back the name of Gregory
Rasputin from oblivion. At the same time some sectarian monks organized
rumors about possible canonization of Gregory Rasputin as a "martyr and
saint" who was assassinated by the family of the "bad" tsar.
Rasputin's daughter, Matrena Solovyova-Rasputina, and her husband,
Boris Solovyov, who secretly collaborated with the Communist regime,
took money and jewelery from Empress
Tsarina Alexandra in exchange for a
promise of assist the Tsar Nicholas II
and his family to escape from the Communist regime. They betrayed the
Tsar and his family and left them to be killed by the communists, while
themselves escaped to France. There Rasputin's daughter, who was money
hungry, read the memoirs of Prince
Feliks Yusupov, and filed several law
suits against Prince Yusupov, who gave accounts of Rasputin's death
under oath in 1934 and 1965. Eventually Rasputin's daughter ended up
working for a circus as a tiger tamer, then she moved to Los Angeles,
and died there in 1977.
figures who posed as a "holy man" and destroyed the political image and
reputation of Russia's Emperor
Tsar Nicholas II and his family through
a series of political manipulations, disgusting scandals and treachery,
provoking a huge wave of public anger and helping the communists to
prepare the disastrous Russian revolution. His mysterious activity is
still disputed by historians and religious authors, mostly because he
left no papers or documents with the exception of a few messages, while
acting behind-the-scenes inside the Palaces of the Russian Tsars, and
he remained inaccessible to public because of the heavy security that
surrounded the Russian Imperial family.
He was born Gregory Efimovich Rasputin in 1869 into a Russian peasant
family in Pokrovskoye village, Tobolsk province in Siberia. He was the
only surviving child of Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin and Anna Vasilevna
Rasputina--their four previous children died before he was born. The
family name, Rasputin, has a negative connotation, similar to
"ill-behaved" or "ill-aimed". His mother died when Rasputin was young
and his father was imprisoned for some time. Gregory had very little
schooling and was unable to read or write. At age 16 he was arrested
for theft, and the citizens of Pokrovskoe appealed to the authorities
to excommunicate and exile him. Rasputin was sentenced to three months
in prison, which was later commuted to serving his term at Verkhoturye
Monastery in Siberia. Rasputin settled with the lonely monk Makariy,
who lived in a rugged hut and practiced rituals akin to ancient
shamanic and tribal traditions of the Siberian people. Rasputin
mentioned that Makariy had cured him of a severe sleep disorder and
trained him to practice hypnotism and a vegetarian lifestyle, which
included some alcohol and also the use of various weeds and drugs for
"spiritual transformation" according to ancient shamanic rituals.
Rasputin stated later that he modeled himself after Makariy. At that
time he became interested in manipulating people through their
weaknesses and beliefs, including use of their personal and social
habits as well as their politics and religion. He was also introduced
to the banned mystical sect of Khlysty (flagellants), whose had a
strong sexual content among other exotic practices. Rasputin evolved
into a cynical and ruthless manipulator who practiced his principle
that "any sin shall make me a holy man" and was spreading his beliefs
around. In 1889 Rasputin married Praskovia Feodorovna and had three
children, but left his family in Siberia and became a wanderer. He
walked across Russia on foot from Siberia to Kiev and back several
times during the 1890s, then made a pilgrimage on foot to Greece and
Jerusalem during 1901, walking back to Russia and staying in Kazan with
a local priest who gave him a letter of recommendation to St.
Peterburg, the Russian capital. He arrived in the city in 1903, and
solicited money to build a church in his home village of Pokrovskoe. In
St. Petersburg Rasputin was accommodated by none other than Father
Sergiy (who later, in 1942, was appointed by
Joseph Stalin the Head of Orthodox
Christianity in the Soviet Union), who was at that time Director of St.
Petersburg Holy Academy and Seminary and also was a clandestine
political opponent of Tsar Nicholas II. At several reception parties
staged by Father Sergiy, Rasputin stunned St. Petersburg society by his
forecasts that Russia would be defeated in the Russo-Japanese war of
1904, and that the Russian navy "would sink down", which was exactly
what happened next.
Soon the Ober-Procurator of Russia, Pobedonostsev, issued a ban on
public appearances of Father Sergiy and Rasputin, declaring that
Rasputin was hiding his manipulative traits under the cover of
"holyness" and illegally declared himself an Orthodox Christian mystic.
Rasputin, however, ignored that ban and continued posing as a "prophet"
and healer. He continued his wanderings as a self-proclaimed "holy
man", often using lies and hypnotism to intimidate people into
submission and then used them for his own goals. He made loose
affiliations with various monasteries, then appointed himself a
religious "elder" in St. Petersburg. At that time mystical
interpretations of Christianity were in vogue, and official Orthodox
Christianity was losing its control over people amidst the
proliferation of disastrous wars and civil unrest, including
revolutions. After the failure of several "religious advisers" to bring
peace into the seriously dysfunctional Russian royal family of Tsar
Nicholas II, Rasputin was summoned by Anna Vyrubova and the famous
ascetic mystic, Father Theofan, the religious adviser to the royal
family. In October of 1905 Father Sergiy and Father Theofan arranged
Rasputin's introduction to the royal household through some relatives
of reigning Romanov family. Rasputin instantly found a way to use the
weaknesses and insecurities of Crown Prince
Aleksey Nikolaeyvitch Romanov,
whose incurable illness--he was a hemophiliac, having inherited the
disease from his grandmother, Britain's
Queen Victoria--was the main concern of
the royal family. Rasputin convinced the Empress,
Tsarina Alexandra, that he could
improve the health of young Crown Prince Aleksey. Both Tsar Nicholas II
and his wife were devastated and demoralized by their son's illness,
and their anxiety and desperation was used by Rasputin, and the people
behind him, in a crafty way to achieve goals that suited their
political agenda.
At the same time Tsar Nicholas was warned by his loyal prime minister,
Count Stolypin, that Rasputin was a dangerous fraud who could become a
threat to the royal family and to Russia. However, at Tsar Nicholas'
insistence, Stolypin had a private meeting with Rasputin. Not long
afterward Stolypin was assassinated by a hired terrorist, and the
resulting investigation by the authorities was stopped order of the
Emperor. Stolypin's records revealed that he had an argument with
Rasputin, but he was stopped and intimidated by the hypnotic stare of
Rasputin's piercing eyes. Stolypin and many other political figures of
that time had documented that Rasputin had "satanic eyes" and he was
possessed of a powerful and hypnotic glare that he used to intimidate
and cow his enemies. Rasputin also often used verbal abuse and
intimidation, including the most foul profanities--a practice
considered shocking in the rarefied air of the Russian court--to
intimidate and manipulate people into submission. At the height of his
political influence, Rasputin was constantly guarded by six agents
provided by the Russian security service by order of Tsarina Alexandra.
Also by the Imperial order Rasputin was given a new name, Novykh,
meaning the "new man", an exclamation attributed to the suffering boy,
Crown Prince Aleksey.
Rasputin apparently persuaded both the Empress and her ailing son to
ensure that he kept a permanent presence in the tsar's palaces, and he
was appointed to an official court position as "personal healer" to
Crown Prince Aleksey Nikolaeyvitch Romanov. Rasputin may had some
limited beneficial effect on Prince Aleksey's condition through
hypnotism, but it apparently was enough to convince both the Empress
and the Prince to depend more and more on Rasputin's presence and his
hypnotic abilities. Rasputin also insisted that real medical doctors
should be kept away from Alexey, constantly telling the family, "Don't
let the doctors bother him, let him rest." On the occasions when
Aleksey's health had actually improved, Rasputin used the opportunity
to take personal credit for the Prince's "improvement", thereby
solidifying his control over access to the royal family.
The Empress became a patron of Rasputin, who soon established himself
as an extremely powerful figure within the Russian court. The Emperor
was calling Rasputin a "holy man" and referred to him as "our friend".
Rasputin referred to the Emperor and the Empress only as "papa" and
"mama" and always used a frank and "sincere" tone in conversations with
the royal family. Meanwhile, government security sources reported about
wild orgies at the many parties and gatherings at Rasputin's residence,
located just a few blocks away from the Tsar's palace and paid for out
of the Russian Treasury. Rasputin's drinking binges were reported as
"massive and wild" that often degenerated into drunken and violent sex
orgies, designed to entangle politicians and other guests who could
prove useful to Rasputin's ambitions. He aggressively indoctrinated his
victims by using, among other methods, his motto "Sin that you may
obtain forgiveness!", which was in line with the views he learned from
the sect of Khlysty.
Soon Rasputin and people behind him succeeded in using his influence to
entangle many politicians in scandals, including dirty manipulations
involving their wives, drinking parties, promiscuity, and massive
embezzlement of the government funds during the First World War, by
diverting money to special interests through insiders within the
Treasury of Russia. Rasputin also manipulated the Empress
Tsarina Alexandra to make
controversial political appointments, which led to a bitter divide
within all classes of the Russian society, causing a blow to the public
image of the Imperial House of the Romanovs. Rasputin's manipulative
activities provoked many conflicts within the Russian government and
the Russian military command during the First World War. Rasputin was
using his position inside the Tsar's Palace to directly interfere with
Tsar's communications with the government and media, thus undermining
the Tsar's public image. At several times Rasputin was able to
interfere with the Tsar's schedule of meetings with political figures
as well as military commanders during the war.
In 1914, while visiting a church in Siberian city of Tobolsk, Rasputin
was attacked by his former prostitute-friend, Khionia Guseva, who then
turned a religious disciple of monk Iliodor. Ms. Guseva approached
Rasputin with a knife and wounded him in the stomach, but he recovered
from the wound and soon gained an even stronger influence on the
Empress Tsarina Alexandra. Later Ms.
Guseva said to the Grand Jury that she acted in clear mind and full
understanding that "Rasputin is the Antichrist harmful to the people of
Russia." However she was declared insane and was forcefully placed in
an asylum in Siberia. Rasputin's most destructive actions were
committed in 1916, when he convinced the
Tsar Nicholas II to move from the
Russian capital, St. Petersburg, to the front-lines in Belarus, leaving
the Empress Alexandra alone under his influence and in charge of
internal politics of the country. In absence of the Tsar, St.
Petersburg was surreptitiously over-taken by the revolutionary
communists, who penetrated into many regiments of the Army, the Navy,
as well as into the local political circles in the capital of Russia,
thus preparing for the Communist Revolution of 1917. The decade of
Rasputin's destructive manipulations led to irreparable political and
economic damage and caused a bitter divide within the government and
military command, as well as within all social layers of Russia. At
that time the French ambassador Maurice Paléologue made a record that
the "Russian Empress is mystically devoted to Rasputin."
Communist leader Vladimir Lenin wrote, "monstrous
Rasputin is pushing the Tsar's regime to a disaster", which was helping
the communist revolution. According to historians Rasputin was used by
a secret group behind the communist revolutionaries, which acted to
destroy the Romanov dynasty and the monarchy, and eventually fulfilled
their plans and came to power through revolution. That explained how
and why Rasputin was manipulated to discredit the royal family and
personally the Tsar Nicholas II.
Rasputin's main handler was a St. Petersburg's underworld drug lord,
named Dr. Badmayev, who controlled Rasputin through his drug addiction
and often instructed Rasputin about his political moves. Rasputin often
stayed overnight after having a fix at Dr. Badmayev's home in St.
Petersburg. At the same time, Rasputin's hypnotic influence over the
Empress Alexandra and the Crown Prince Alexey remained very strong,
allowing him to make political, ecclesiastical and military
appointments for those who served his interests. Rasputin created and
used public scandals and rumors about his sexual and alcoholic
excesses, and designed crafty entrapments for many members of the
Russian political establishment into orgies and scandals for immediate
blackmail and exploitation. He polarized the society by using his
political influence in securing the appointments and dismissals of
several military commanders and government ministers during the First
World War. Rasputin's abuse of power and his notorious debauchery was
used by the communist propaganda to depict Rasputin with the Empress
Alexandra in numerous pornographic comics, drawings and provocative
publications as part of a massive negative publicity campaign against
the House of Romanovs and the Russian monarchy. In the communist
propaganda Rasputin was shown as a peasant who turned the Russian Tsar
into a wimp, so the country was in "bad hands" and "proletarians must
join with peasants to overthrow the monarchy and take power", so
declared the communist leader Vladimir Lenin, who
in turn was secretly financed by the German military.
In 1916, during the most difficult time in the First World War,
brothers of Tsar Nicholas II obtained
evidence that Rasputin was secretly negotiating a peace treaty with
Germany while Russia's position in the war was not good. Rasputin said
on record that "too many peasants were dead because of the war",
indicating his agenda to settle "peace at any cost" which was also in
line with the communist propaganda, and helped the German Armies.
Peasants deserted from the Russian Army by hundreds of thousands, then
armed peasants came to St. Petersburg and joined the communist
revolutionary brigades. Rasputin's secret activity and his contacts
with the Germans became a political scandal. Tsar's cousin, Grand
Prince Nicholas, announced that he wants to hang Rasputin for treachery
as a spy in German employ, albeit Rasputin was under the protection of
the Empress Tsarina Alexandra, who
herself was German. That led to a plot by a group of aristocrats, led
by Prince Feliks Yusupov, a relative of
the Tsar, to assassinate him, but Rasputin was officially guarded by
six agents from the Russian Imperial Security under constant
supervision of specially assigned officers who lived in Rasputin's
house in St. Petersburg.
In November of 1916, Prince Yusupov pretended that he had chest pains
and obtained a high recommendation to become a patient of Rasputin.
Prince Feliks Yusupov made several visits
to Rasputin as a patient and soon he made friends with Rasputin and
presented him a picture of his wife, beautiful Princess Irene Yusupov,
niece of the Emperor Tsar Nicholas II.
Rasputin immediately became horny and expressed his desire to meet the
beauty. On December 16, 1916, Prince Yusupov and his fellow officers
designed a plan centered on using the beautiful Princess Irina Yusupov,
as a bait. On December 29, 1916, Prince
Feliks Yusupov personally invited
Rasputin to a dinner and drove him to Yusupov's Moika Palace in St.
Petersburg. There Rasputin was waiting for the appearance of the
Princess Irina Yusupov, but she never showed up. Meanwhile, Rasputin
was plied with wine and food that had been laced with cyanide, albeit
the plotters were oblivious to the fact of chemistry that cyanide is
often neutralized by some ingredients in food, as it turns into a
harmless salt in most desserts and wines. Rasputin also had a condition
with hyper-acidity and post-surgical stomach problems which caused him
to minimize his intake of sugar and alcohol. When the poison had no
apparent effect on Rasputin, Prince
Feliks Yusupov pulled out his gun and
fired, but Rasputin's life was saved because the first bullet was
reflected by the hard metal button on his coat, he was wounded, but
still managed to jump up and tried to escape out of the Moika Palace.
Then Prince Yusupov and Count Vladimir Purishkevich together with their
friend, British intelligence officer Oswald Rayner, pulled out their
guns and fired at Rasputin, then, noticing that he was still trying to
get up, they clubbed him into submission. In the early morning of
December 30, 1916, members of the plot wrapped Rasputin and dragged him
into the icy waters until he finally drowned in the Neva River.
Even after his death, Rasputin still remained dangerous and could be
used as a destructive and divisive tool, because he left a wild and
threatening message to Emperor
Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra,
predicting their death and disaster for Russia. Crown Prince Alexey
remained gravely ill and was heavily dependent and conditioned to
Rasputin's hypnotic influence. Rasputin's body was buried upon Empress
Alexandra's and Prince Alexey's request at the location in the park of
Tsarkoe Selo, near the Summer Palace of the Russian Tsars. Two months
after Rasputin's assassination, Emperor
Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, then was
arrested as citizen Romanov who was obediently sweeping snow from roads
while waiting for his sentence under supervision of communist
revolutionaries. Soon both Nicholas and Alexandra became increasingly
paranoid about having Rasputin's grave next to his Summer Palace.
Ironically, Tsar Nicholas II was under
the house arrest in that same palace during the year of 1917, and both
Empress Alexandra and Prince Alexey were not allowed to make visits to
Rasputin's grave, which was vandalized by revolutionaries in search for
valuables. By that time, Rasputin's body was removed upon the order
from Aleksandr Kerensky, the head of
the Russian provisional government, who previously was a student at the
same school and at the same time with the future communist leader
Vladimir Lenin. Initially Kerensky ordered to
remove Rasputin's body to a remote cemetery, but during the move,
Rasputin's body, masked as a piano in a wooden box, was destroyed in
the fire started by a group of revolutionaries. Shortly after the
Communist Revolution, the entire family of Tsar
Tsar Nicholas II with his wife and five
children were executed, then Tsar's Palaces were vandalized by the
revolutionary communists and Rasputin's grave was again burglarized by
poor proletarians in search for jewelery.
Later, while in emigration outside of the Communist Russia (then Soviet
Union), both accounts by Prince
Feliks Yusupov (who lived through the
1960s) and Count Vladimir Purishkevich (who died in the 1920s) were
published in their respectful books of memoirs about their plot and
assassination of Rasputin in the context of their participation in the
historic events. Prince Yusupov compared Rasputin's cynical and
manipulative treatment of the Tsar's family to the Communist Party's
ruthless methods of control over innocent people of Russia. Rasputin's
own "religious" speeches were interpreted and recorded by his enchanted
admirers and titled "holy wanderings" and "holy thoughts" when first
published in Russia in 1907 and in 1915. In 1942, Soviet dictator
Joseph Stalin appointed the notorious St.
Petersburg Bishop Sergiy the Patriarch of Orthodix Christianity in the
Soviet Union. Then Patriarch Sergiy brought back the name of Gregory
Rasputin from oblivion. At the same time some sectarian monks organized
rumors about possible canonization of Gregory Rasputin as a "martyr and
saint" who was assassinated by the family of the "bad" tsar.
Rasputin's daughter, Matrena Solovyova-Rasputina, and her husband,
Boris Solovyov, who secretly collaborated with the Communist regime,
took money and jewelery from Empress
Tsarina Alexandra in exchange for a
promise of assist the Tsar Nicholas II
and his family to escape from the Communist regime. They betrayed the
Tsar and his family and left them to be killed by the communists, while
themselves escaped to France. There Rasputin's daughter, who was money
hungry, read the memoirs of Prince
Feliks Yusupov, and filed several law
suits against Prince Yusupov, who gave accounts of Rasputin's death
under oath in 1934 and 1965. Eventually Rasputin's daughter ended up
working for a circus as a tiger tamer, then she moved to Los Angeles,
and died there in 1977.