Other accounts claim that he reached the monastery simply by chance, after giving lifts to a seminary student or a priest: the prospective passenger had been obliged to seek out his carter, Grishka, and finally unearthed him at home, in an armchair, snoring loudly.
The Verkhoturye Monastery was considered by some clerics to be pagan, housing sectarians of whom the regular Orthodox Church disapproved. The most extreme of these sectarians were known as khlysty and would whip each other: ‘khlyst’ being the Russian for whip. The khlyst men were forever either testing their mettle by sharing beds with ‘spiritual wives’ and resisting temptation or throwing themselves into sadomasochistic orgies. Some preferred not to trust to their mettle and simply to castrate themselves.
At that time there were khlyst churches, ‘arks’, in 30 Russian provinces. Congregations, known as ‘ships’, would gather, wearing white ‘tunics of fervour’ and calling themselves Christs or Mothers of God. The founder of the movement had thrown all his books into the river, seeking instead the ‘golden book of life’ and instigating the worship of a Christ figure born to a woman and man both aged 100. Rasputin would presumably have chosen the golden book of life over real books. But he might not have been so keen on the ancient parents: his distaste for older women was matched by rage at his ageing father.
Rasputin spent three months at Verkhoturye, where it seems he was preyed upon by at least two over-excited monks. His first admirer, Father Josif, pressed a thigh against him during a visit to his cell: Grishka was obliged to pile furniture against the door to prevent further calls. Father Josif was then joined by a second admirer, Father Sergius; the pair pleaded together through the door: ‘We want to love you.’
He did, however, meet one monk, Father Makari, who appealed to him. Father Makari had misbehaved in his early life. Now he lived in a tumble-down shed and slept on a mud floor; he ate almost nothing but black bread and wore chains to mortify his flesh. The British Embassy chaplain, the Rev Mr Lombard, wrote approvingly of a good influence on Rasputin, doubtless Makari, who ‘talked to him about the brevity of life, the necessity of preparation for death and hideousness of sin and the means of achieving salvation’. The Rev Mr Lombard would not have been put off by tales of Makari’s extreme devotion: he himself performed exorcisms and was a student of the occult.
Rasputin kept in touch with Makari for the rest of his life, at one point even persuading the Tsar to give him money. Makari’s only indulgence was his poultry: deprived of human company, he would chat to his hens and chickens.
A new Grishka returned to Pokrovskoye having given up alcohol, tobacco and meat. His supporters claim he did not touch vodka for years. In years to come he developed an odd belief that carnivores were in some way blackened by meat; fish eaters, on the other hand, were lightened and might even acquire a halo. The reformed Rasputin appeared ‘with dishevelled hair and no hat, singing and waving his arms, blazing with the fire of the zealous convert’. During church services, he swung his arms and made grimaces; he beat his head on the church floor until it bled and ‘sang in an improper voice’. To the relief of many of the congregants, he began holding separate services in a hole dug under the family stable.
This increase in religious fervour did not dull his sex drive. He may have resisted some button-pulling at first, but, as a healthy married man of 28, he was not about to become celibate. He soon began practising a sort of khlyst-style fusion of sex and religion.
This process began, curiously, with his successful resistance to the charms of a woodcutter’s wife. He had undergone a struggle after being ‘made to feel the pressure of her breasts against his arms and neck in the small izba’. Leaving the woodcutter’s house frustrated, his attention was caught by some birds which, he maintained, were singing love songs to each other. The birds offered an irresistible example of joy in love and, declaring that ‘nature glorifies God and makes us joyful’, he resolved never to pass up any future opportunity for sex.
As luck would have it, he promptly ran into three obliging women bathing nude in the river. His approving daughter, Maria, later wrote: ‘They accepted his love-making one by one.’ After the ‘love feast’, Rasputin claimed he was put into a meditative state: ‘The Virgin smiled at him.’ He was keen to spread the word, taking his joy in love a stage further, insisting: ‘chastity is the sin of pride’. He initiated orgies around fires under the stables, merrily embracing what he referred to as ‘mutual sin’.
In one account, a Mr Verintsew describes a religious ceremony and orgy conducted by Rasputin in the woods near Pokrovskoye. The worshippers dug a pit, which they filled with logs and leaves. Rasputin then lit a fire, offered prayers to St Michael and threw incense into the flames. The congregants held hands and began to dance; Rasputin prided himself on his dancing; he would leap and shout ‘Oh’, in the manner of someone lowered into icy water, then whirl in place for a whole hour at a time. If a dance had to go one way or the other, he made a point of dancing towards the left.
His daughter claimed that, when he heard songs such as ‘Along the Roadway’ and ‘Troika, Fluffy Snow’, he couldn’t restrain himself. He would float about the room ‘like a feather’, with all the natural grace of Tolstoy’s Natasha Rostov. Maria was delighted by her father’s response to music: ‘The rhythm of it made him vibrate as it does all primitive and sensitive people.’ He himself had no reservations about dancing: ‘David danced before the Ark of the Covenant.’
After dancing, the congregants, dizzy and overcome by ‘spiritual beer’, traditionally fell down. Then, as the embers of the fire were dying, they would turn to each other and have sex, or ‘rejoice’. The khlyst leader, known as the pilot, would set the ball rolling, bearing down upon his female followers in a ‘sweet smelling cloud’.
Mr Verintsew described how Rasputin, as pilot, descended on his female congregants, proclaiming: ‘I cleanse you of all your sins.’ Once the orgy was underway, wrote Mr Verintsew, the battle-cry was: ‘Sin for salvation!’ The correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, E.J. Dillon, later wrote wryly of Rasputin: ‘The simple souls who gathered around him as their saviour were amazed at the ease with which they could qualify for the Kingdom of Heaven.’
While Mr Verintsew’s vivid descriptions seem plausible enough, Maria’s claim that her father dabbled in black magic seems less likely. She maintained that her father took part in black masses during which the Lord’s Prayer was recited backwards and wine poured into the navel of a naked girl on the altar. In her accounts there is often a conflict between her love of her father and her weakness for sensationalism.
With his increasing influence, Grishka developed an unlikely taste for sophistry. He offered one miscreant in Pokrovskoye an unlikely prediction: ‘You will attain the highest rank.’ When the miscreant was hanged for murder, Grishka was challenged with the prediction. He replied with unexpected aplomb: ‘I told you he’d be placed above everybody.’
The Pokrovskoye village priest, Father Peter, remained unimpressed. He had red hair and a red beard and apparently looked as though he was about to burst into flames. He complained to the Bishop of Tobolsk of Rasputin’s practices. According to Maria, he was angry primarily because Rasputin was costing him money, taking services for which he himself was normally paid. But then Maria herself hated Father Peter because he had thumped her on the ear when she hadn’t learnt her catechism.
It seemed now that for every new follower whose soul Rasputin ‘lightened’, there was an ill-wisher lined up with Father Peter. Indeed, Yussoupov always maintained that, if Rasputin hadn’t left Pokrovskoye, he would have ended up in the River Tura and nobody would have searched for him. Rasputin himself admitted: ‘People blamed me when things went wrong, even if I had nothing to do with it.’ But he later said confusingly: ‘I spent my first 28 years in the world and I was one with it.’
So it was perhaps just as well that, in 1898, aged 29, Grigory Rasputin experienced a life-changing vision. He was taking a break, standing halfway down a furrow
and leaning on his hoe, when the Virgin Mary appeared, hovering in the sky and pointing to the horizon. She wore a purple-brown veil and dress and looked, coincidentally, exactly like a statue of the Virgin in the Kazan Cathedral at St Petersburg. This vision was accompanied by the celestial voices of 1,000 angels. Whatever sceptics later made of the vision, Rasputin himself had no doubts, proudly marking the relevant furrow with a wooden cross.
That night he claimed he woke to find his icon of the Virgin Mary weeping and issuing silent instructions: ‘Go, wander, and cleanse people of their sins.’ At Verkhoturye, the ascetic Makari was very excited when he heard of the manifestations, telling Rasputin he must now walk thousands of miles to Mount Athos in Greece.
The family had mixed reactions when they heard of Rasputin’s new calling. His wife, Praskovia, mindful of her husband’s appetites, worried that there was ‘something lacking in the way she responded to his love-making’. His father was equally convinced his son was simply skiving off the harvest. Rasputin failed to tell either of them when exactly he planned to leave; they only realised he’d gone when they noticed his robe and staff were missing.
It would take him a full ten months to reach Mount Athos. He would have been sporting a beard at this time, as Athos had laws forbidding entry to ‘any woman, any female, any eunuch and anyone with smooth visage’. He was horrified to find monks openly engaged in homosexual activity and later complained to Makari that he’d seen monks ravaging a novice. He claimed that only one in a hundred pilgrims was following in the footsteps of Christ. He himself was proud of his privations, boasting peremptorily: ‘Wore shackles for three years, was attacked by wolves, they did not harm me.’ He claimed to have gone six months without changing his underwear or laying hands upon himself.
He entered into a routine. Every spring he would wander to holy places and return, perhaps conveniently, after the harvest. At one point he claimed to have walked to the Holy Land and, in the space of two and a half years, to have walked 7,000 miles. He would boast of his endurance: ‘I didn’t sleep for 40 nights each spring.’ How much walking he actually did is impossible to know. It is tempting to imagine him walking to the next village and holing up in a bar until the harvest was safely over.
His patchy presence at home was, however, much prized by his young children, including the new baby, Varya. He took all three to fetes and retained sufficient energy after his pilgrimages to play ball games. His decision to teach Dmitri to drive the family cart proved unwise; aged 13, Dmitri tipped the cart over with 11-year-old Maria on board. Fortunately, both were unhurt. He relayed Russian fables, including the Dragonfly and the Ant, the Rich Man and the Cobbler and, perhaps most appropriately, the Poet and the Millionaire.
Praskovia never failed to welcome her constantly returning husband, falling to her knees in homage. This, despite his frequently being so bedraggled that she struggled to recognise him. She was not put out by his new habit of bringing back groups of young women in nun’s clothes. It was around this time that his lifelong love of unimaginative nicknames was spawned as he named these early followers: ‘Hot Stuff’, ‘Boss Lady’, ‘Sexy Girl’. He made up equally leaden titles for the boys that he came across: ‘Fella’, ‘Long Hair’ or ‘Big Breeches’.
There was the odd scandal, including a woman who claimed he had raped her in his cellar. But the doughty Praskovia took it all in her stride. Indeed, she convinced herself that sex was a burden for her Grishka. She was learning well: altruistic sin was one of her husband’s favourite notions. He maintained that he generously took upon himself the sin of each of his sexual encounters and, further, that these sins reduced the overall amount in the world. Presumably he nodded his whiskery head sagely as Praskovia lamented: ‘Each man must bear his cross and this is his.’
After more pressure from the irascible Father Peter, an inquiry into Rasputin’s activities was launched in Pokrovskoye in 1903 by Bishop Anthony of Tobolsk. Rasputin never had any official role within the Church, but some of the Church leaders clearly felt that his spiritual activities fell under their jurisdiction. A policeman snuck into his services dressed as a peasant. Unfortunately for Father Peter, the inquiry foundered, as the policeman not only failed to find anything irregular, but succumbed to a full-blown attack of what would become known as ‘Rasputinschina’.
Rasputin was aged 33 when he decided he had had enough of rustic life and set out on a near-600-mile walk to the nearest city, Kazan. Or at least that is how it would appear. It is hard to tell how purposeful Rasputin actually was in many of the things he did in his life – to what extent he directed himself and to what extent his actions were dictated by random moods and circumstances.
It was in Kazan that he had his first taste of fine living, sitting in lavishly carpeted rooms, watching gentlefolk sip tea rather than suck it through sugar. His subsequent passion for gadgets was inspired by this first sight of radios, electric lights and, most importantly, telephones.
The telephone was to become a staple of Rasputin’s life. In later years he would use the phone to vet women callers, asking how old they were and what they looked like, before making appointments. He and his daughter Maria became notorious for making nuisance calls. Maria would make suggestive overtures to men listed in the phone directory, while Rasputin enjoyed exposing bashful supporters when he knew they had company, waiting on the line with grim satisfaction, as the manservant delivered the unwelcome news: ‘I have Grishka Rasputin on the phone.’ His happiest moments on the telephone, however, were spent dancing: a singer friend would run through a medley of songs while he clutched the receiver and danced in squats, twirls and stamps.
Shortly after his arrival in Kazan, Rasputin managed to gain the confidence of one particular cleric after warning him of a knife attack. But other clerics were not so impressed by his burgeoning love of the bath-house. They heard that he was inviting women to wash his genitals: ‘Take off your clothes and wash the muzhik’ [peasant]. The women would watch as he, at least in theory, controlled himself; they would then thrash him with twigs. At one point he took two sisters, aged 15 and 20, for a thorough session of washing and thrashing. When he was accosted by their outraged mother, he pronounced grandly: ‘Now you may feel at peace. The Day of Salvation has dawned for your daughters.’ An accusation levelled at Rasputin by the Tobolsk Theological Consistory concerning his ‘odd behaviour towards women’ did nothing to dampen his ardour. Indeed, the joys of urban life took such a hold that he was soon gravitating from Kazan towards the larger city of Kiev.
It was widely acknowledged that the Man of God’s eyes were mesmeric and that he could expand and contract the pupils at will
In Kiev he had his first encounter with Russia’s Imperial family. Grand Duchess Militza was married to the Tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Peter, and was the elder of two Montenegrin princesses, known as the ‘Black Sisters’ or ‘Black Peril’. She considered herself a religious expert and in the early 1900s was the proud author of ‘Selected Passages from the Holy Fathers’.
Intrigued by tales of Rasputin’s powers, Militza, then visiting Kiev, tracked him down to an obscure shed, where she found him sawing wood. She and her younger sister, Princess Anastasia, had once been considered great beauties at Court. Militza retained a soulful face, with large, dark, sorrowful eyes and a delicate mouth, but by this time she was well into her thirties and evidently held no interest for Rasputin. Though aware of her presence, he carried on sawing noisily. She told him to sit down but he refused; when she asked how long he would remain in Kiev, he replied curtly that God would tell him when he should leave. His abrasiveness and her conciliatory responses would become characteristic of Rasputin’s exchanges with members of the aristocracy, who were prone to welcome his rudeness as a mark of integrity.
Their second meeting was altogether happier. Rasputin had arrived in the Russian capital, St Petersburg, in 1903. His unlikely claim was that he had come to raise money for the church at Pokrovskoye. Whatever was behind his motivations,
he seems to have decided, at this point, that it might be worth being civil to grand duchesses after all. He paid a visit to Militza and her younger ‘black sister’, Anastasia. Completing a formidable party would be the Tsar’s so-called ‘dread uncle’, Grand Duke Nicholas.
The Montenegrin Princesses Anastasia and Militza, with a tambourine, circa 1890. The Black Peril, as they became known, were considered great beauties.
It emerged, during the visit, that Anastasia was consumed with worry about her dog: vets had given him barely two months to live and he was breathing heavily. Tea was postponed while Rasputin put his hand on the dog’s head, shut his eyes and prayed for a good half-hour. When the dog’s breathing improved, the Grand Duke stepped forward jubilantly, but was brazenly waved away. By the end of the prayer, the dog was restored to health and keen to lick his healer’s well-seasoned hand. Rasputin issued a bald pronouncement, which would, in fact, prove accurate: ‘He will live for some years.’
Years later, when Rasputin’s wife, Praskovia, needed a hysterectomy, the grateful Grand Duke Nicholas paid for the best surgeons in St Petersburg. Praskovia had woken in the night, screaming with pain, thinking that she was suffering from cramps. She had then collapsed while working in the fields. Her husband, by that time fully immersed in the comforts of Court life, may have felt twinges of guilt as he made the six-day journey back to Pokrovskoye to pick her up.
After the operation, Rasputin treated her to a drozhky ride around the sights, including the Peter and Paul Fortress and the Winter Palace. But Praskovia was not impressed: ‘I don’t want to live here,’ she proclaimed, before taking the first train available back to Tyumen. Rasputin’s father, Efim, had been equally underwhelmed by St Petersburg: upon his arrival, he made the sign of the cross, and left the city within a week.
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