And it is at that moment that the Holy Spirit descends into their ‘pure bodies’.
That is why they teach that if any children are born from that night, they are born not of the flesh but of the Holy Spirit.
Expressed in Khlyst doctrine is the dangerous courage of the Russian soul — it is not frightened of sin. For, as the Khlysty teach, in the religious person sin is always followed by great suffering, and that suffering leads to a profound repentance. And a great purification of the soul that brings that person closer to God. The continuous alternation of great sin and great repentance is the central idea. Sin — repentance — purification constitute the essential gymnastics of the soul.
And without grasping that Khlyst idea of ridding oneself of sin through sin, without grasping, in other words, the concept of ‘spiritual gymnastics’ and their importance in sin, we shall not understand Rasputin.
The official church recognized the danger of the Khlysty and started to fight against them. In Moscow in 1733 seventy-eight people were condemned, their leaders executed, and the rest exiled to remote monasteries. The grave of the sect’s founder, Daniil Filippovich, in the Ivanov Monastery was dug up and his remains burned. But that did not stop the Khlyst movement.
The ‘First Arrival’ Of The Khlysty At The Palaces
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, not only illiterate peasants but also landowners, clergy, and the highest nobility had become involved in the Khlyst heresy. At the start of the century a secret Khlyst sect operated in Petersburg at the Mikhailov Castle, the former residence of Emperor Paul I. At its head was a ‘Mother of God’, the colonel’s wife E. F. Tartarinova, née Baroness Buchsgefden. She had, upon marrying, converted from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy. And it was at that moment that she ‘felt that the Holy Spirit had entered her’. She sensed that she was a Mother of God and recognized the gift of prophecy in herself. Half-coherent prophetic incantations and frenzied Khlyst whirling under the guidance of the baroness were engaged in nightly in the Mikhailov Castle. And the highest Petersburg nobility participated in the rites. Generals, dukes, and important officials like P. Koshelev, the court steward, and Prince A. Golitsyn, the minister of enlightenment and spiritual affairs. It was all clothed in secrecy, and the participants carefully kept that secret safe from the crude hands of the uninitiated.
Tartarinova’s sect continued its activity during the whole reign of Alexander I.
But rites that in the beginning had possessed a severely ascetic character gradually degenerated into a wild orgy of unrestrained passion. It was only in 1837, during the reign of Nicholas I, that Tartarinova was arrested and forcibly removed to a convent. The grandees who joined the Khlysty were an exception, however. The sect remained above all a peasant movement, a strange ‘Orthodoxy of the people’.
The Fanatical Russian Heresies
But the idea of purifying oneself of sin through sin began to raise doubts among some of ‘God’s people’. And then the dream of victory over lust and lechery, without which one could not become a ‘Christ’, gave birth to a fanatical new idea.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the sect known as Skoptsy or ‘Castrators’ separated itself from the Khlysty. The founder of the new sect, Kondraty Selivanov, began inveighing against the sexual dissoluteness of the Khlysty and preaching an absolute asceticism that was achievable only through the ‘fiery baptism’ of castration. The basis of the new doctrine was a passage in the Gospel according to St Matthew that was understood by the semi-literate peasants as a guide to immediate action.
In Matthew, Christ says in a discussion with his disciples that ‘there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it’ (Matthew 19: 12). And from this came mass acts of fanatical self-mutilation. The awful procedure of male castration by means of a red-hot iron (axes were also used) was accompanied by an even more horrible operation on women: external sexual organs, nipples, and even whole breasts were cut off. A ‘supreme degree’ of castration was also invented: the removal of the male sexual organ. All these terrible mutilations of the body were performed voluntarily by the members of the sect. The Skoptsy were preparing themselves for eternal life. And taking support in the same passage in the Gospel according to St Matthew, they believed in their advantage over ordinary mortals. The songs of the Skoptsy during their ceremonies were full of joy and exultation.
And as with the Khlysty, the new sect also attracted the attention of the aristocracy. Landowners, officers, and even clergymen voluntarily castrated themselves. Tsar Alexander I himself found time to talk to the father of the Skoptsy movement, Selivanov.
And after that royal attention, the idea appeared in Skoptsy circles of sending their ‘Christs’ to assist the tsar — for the salvation of his reign which was drowning in bureaucratic thievery and unbelief. An elaborate plan was drawn up for the transformation of Russia into a land where ‘God’s people’ would hold sway. The main living ‘Christ’, Selivanov himself, was to take his place alongside the person of the emperor. And it was proposed that each minister would have his own ‘Christ’ too. The plan was presented to Alexander I in 1803. The idea made him angry. And the plan’s author, the Polish nobleman and eunuch Alexei Elensky, was forced to retire to a monastery.
No matter! The time would still come for one of ‘God’s people’ to rule the country.
Secret Wanderings In Secret ‘Little Corners
But the Skoptsy did not become a mass sect. As before, the most influential mass sect remained the Khlysty.
By the end of the nineteenth century there were powerful Khlyst ‘arks’ in Siberia, in the factories of Perm, for instance. And Khlyst sects had spread throughout European Russia, as well. At the second congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party in 1903, Lenin spoke of a secret Khlyst organization that had ‘taken control of masses of villages and farms in the central part of Russia and was spreading with ever greater strength’.
There were Khlyst communities in Petersburg and its environs, and in Moscow and its suburbs. The famous poet Marina Tsvetaeva recalls in her autobiographical essay ‘Kirill’s Daughters’ how in the town of Tarus, to the astonishment of her childhood imagination, a Khlyst ‘Christ’ and ‘Mother of God’ would come by their orchard to pick apples. ‘Christ has come for apples,’ the adults would say.
So established along the route of Rasputin’s wanderings at that time, there were ‘arks’ — enigmatic communities of Khlyst ‘Christs’ and ‘Mothers of God’.
Driven underground by the official church, the Khlysty worked out rules of behaviour for themselves in the world. ‘Ours’, ‘our own’, the Khlysty called each other, and they conferred conspiratorial aliases to take the place of their real names. ‘Ours’ and the aliases — all of this would soon be heard in the royal palace.
Many of the favourite ideas of the Khlysty are to be found in Rasputin’s ‘works’. Above all, excoriation of the official clergy and contempt for the book learning of the church’s hierarchs. ‘I have had to spend much time among the hierarchs, I have spoken with them at length … Their learning remains insignificant, but they listen to your simple words.’ ‘Learning for the sake of piety is nothing. The letter has confused their minds and bound their feet, and [they] cannot walk in the footsteps of the Saviour.’ And, he says, for that reason, they cannot provide needed counsel to those in want of spiritual nourishment. And then Rasputin adds an important phrase: ‘At the present time, those who are able to give counsel have all been driven into little corners.’
The Khlyst sects ‘driven into little corners’, those ‘arks’ and ‘flotillas’ scattered all over Russia, kept in constant secret communication with each other. And they did so by employing messengers — ‘seraphs’ or ‘flying angels’, that is, wanderers who travelled continuously among the arks.
Hidden here,
perhaps, is an answer to the riddle of the first half of the restless and forever secret of the life of the experienced wanderer.
It was in ‘hidden Rus’ among the Khlysty that Rasputin first set out on his path to God. There he learned a mystical secret — the ability to foster Christ in himself. He started with that. And it is no accident that even then, in that obscure period of his life, he was the subject of investigation.
The First Accusation
The first ecclesiastical persecution of Rasputin dates back to 1903, when his fame had already begun to spread as far as Petersburg itself. As a ‘man of God’, he was denounced in the Tobolsk Theological Consistory for his odd behaviour towards women who came to visit him from ‘Petersburg itself’. He was also denounced regarding the fact that even in his youth Rasputin ‘had brought from his life in the factories of the province of Perm an acquaintance with the teachings of the Khlyst heresy’. An investigator was dispatched to Pokrovskoe. But nothing incriminating was found at the time. Yet from then until his death, the tag of Khlyst never left him.
3
THE PATH TO THE PALACE
Conquest Of The Capital
Rasputin began to prepare for his trip to the capital. A place to which his fame had already preceded him. He was still young. But his face was wrinkled by the sun and wind from his endless wanderings. A peasant’s face — even at twenty-five it might sometimes already be that of an old man. His endless wanderings had made him an unerring judge of people. Holy Scripture, the teachings of the great pastors, the countless sermons he had listened to had all been absorbed by his tenacious memory. In the Khlyst ‘arks’, where pagan spells against disease were combined with the power of Christian prayer, he had learned to heal. He had grasped his strength. A laying-on of his restless, nervous hands was enough. And diseases would dissipate in those hands.
Rasputin appeared in Petersburg in 1903 on the eve of the first Russian revolution. To destroy both Petersburg and that whole world of the tsars, which in a mere fourteen years would become an Atlantis of irretrievable memory.
To our proud capital
He came — God save us!
He charmed the tsarina
Of illimitable Rus …
Why did the crosses on
Kazan Cathedral and Saint Isaac’s
Not bend? Why did not they
Abandon their places?
Nikolai Gumilyov
A Meeting With Stalin’s Patriarch
The legends and conjectures finally come to an end in the capital. Now begins the story of Rasputin that is corroborated by documents and the testimony of witnesses.
As he himself would recount in his ‘Life of an Experienced Wanderer’, he had set out for Petersburg with a great goal — to solicit money for the building of a church in Pokrovskoe: ‘I myself am an illiterate person, and, most important, without means, but in my heart that Temple already stands before my eyes.’
Arriving in the great city, he ‘went first of all to the Alexander Nevsky Abbey’. He attended a service of public prayer and then embarked on a desperate plan — ‘to go directly to the rector of the Theological Seminary, Bishop Sergius, who lived at the abbey’. If this account is to be believed, the notion was indeed a wild one, given his suspicious appearance — worn-out boots, pauper’s coat, tangled beard, and hair combed like a road-house waiter’s. Thus has he been described by the monk Iliodor. And now this wretched peasant is on his way to the bishop’s apartment and asking the doorman to be kind enough to announce him to Sergius. Rasputin himself describes what happened next. ‘The doorman did me the courtesy of a blow on the neck. I fell on my knees before him … He understood there was something special in me and announced me to the bishop.’ Thus, thanks to his ‘specialness’, this peasant directly off the street got in to see Bishop Sergius himself. And captivated him at once.
Astounded by his words, Sergius, according to Rasputin, lodged the unknown peasant at the abbey with him. And not only that! ‘The bishop,’ Rasputin writes, ‘introduced me to “highly placed personages”.’ The ‘highly placed personages’ included the celebrated ascetic and mystic Feofan, who was received at the royal palace.
So does Rasputin describe his arrival in Petersburg in his ‘Life’.
But the period of legend is over. And the File easily demolishes Rasputin’s whole invention. For it contains the testimony of the ‘highly placed’ Feofan about his first meeting with Rasputin.
Feofan was called before the Thirteenth Section of the Extraordinary Commission in 1917. And Feofan, then forty-four years old and bishop of Poltava, testified that ‘Grigory Rasputin first came to Petrograd from the city of Kazan in the winter during the Russo-Japanese War with a letter of introduction from the now deceased Chrysanthos, archimandrite of the Kazan eparchy. Rasputin stayed at the Alexander Nevsky Abbey with Bishop Sergius, the rector of the theological seminary.’
So there was no unfortunate wanderer. By that time, Rasputin’s fame had already reached beyond the boundaries of Siberia. And he had many female admirers in Kazan. And the archimandrite of the Kazan eparchy had himself given Rasputin a letter of introduction to Sergius. So he did not have to make humble requests of the doorman. For he had come to Petersburg with a most powerful letter of introduction from one of the church’s hierarchs. And for that reason, he was of course received by Bishop Sergius without hindrance.
And it was not by chance that Chrysanthos had given Rasputin that letter to Bishop Sergius. At that time, Sergius’s name resounded not only in church circles. The bishop was then at the centre of an event that excited every Russian intellectual.
At the time of Rasputin’s arrival, a series of unusual meetings was under way in the capital on the premises of the Geographical Society. Its narrow elongated hall was invariably packed to overflowing. Gathered on the stage and about the hall were people in cassocks and clerical headgear, and the flower of Russian culture. The meetings were the famous Petersburg religious and philosophical colloquia — a desperate attempt to overcome the destructive separation of the official church and the Russian intelligentsia, and to pull the church out of its lethargy.
At the colloquia the participants talked about the dangerous spiritual crisis in the country and the influence of the sects. The intelligentsia bitterly complained that the official church was becoming increasingly associated in society with obscurantism. That the official preachers failed to speak of the prophetic and mystical essence of Christianity. And that they saw in Christianity only an other-worldly ideal and thus had left earthly life out of the account. The intelligentsia called for the official church to turn its face back to the world and to reveal its spiritual treasures.
The colloquia were chaired by Bishop Sergius, a forty-year-old hierarch and author of audacious theological studies, who had recently been appointed head of the theological seminary.
He had, in the heated disputes, been able to find the right tone. He was not the chair nor a hierarch, but merely a Christian who would say, ‘Don’t argue, be Christians, and then you will achieve everything.’ The colloquia came to an end in April 1903 after twenty-two sessions and twenty-two heated debates, cut short by Chief Procurator Pobedonostsev, who banned them.
(Human destinies are amazing. In 1942, during the war, when he decided to re-establish the office, Stalin appointed Sergius the first Patriarch of All Russia.)
Chrysanthos had chosen Rasputin’s protector well: the future patriarch was open to new trends. How interesting the Siberian prophet of the people must have seemed then in 1903, at the height of that whole story.
And Rasputin did not betray their expectations The ‘specialness’ in the newcomer soon captivated Sergius in truth. And he did in fact introduce Rasputin to ‘highly placed personages’.
As Bishop Feofan has testified in the File, ‘Once he [Bishop Sergius] invited us to his lodgings for tea, and introduced for the first time to me and several monks and seminarians a recently arrived man of God, Brother Grigory as we called him th
en. He amazed us all with his psychological perspicacity. His face was pale and his eyes unusually piercing — the look of someone who observed the fasts. And he made a strong impression.’
By then rumours of Rasputin’s exceptional gift had reached Petersburg. Which is why the ‘highly placed personages’ wanted prophecies. And here Rasputin astonished them. ‘At the time,’ Feofan testified, ‘Admiral Rozhdestvensky’s squadron had already set sail. We therefore asked Rasputin, “Will its engagement with the Japanese be successful?” Rasputin answered, “I feel in my heart that it will be sunk.” And his prediction subsequently came to pass in the battle of Tsushima Strait.’
What was happening here? An intelligent peasant who knew from the inside the whole unhappy weakness of his great country? Or had Rasputin merely heard what was being written then in all the Russian newspapers: that a squadron consisting of antediluvian ships, sailing without any concealment to engage a modern Japanese fleet in battle, was doomed? Or was it given him to comprehend the mysterious?
In any event, when ‘Rasputin correctly told the students of the seminary whom he was seeing for the first time that one would be a writer and that another was ill, and then explained to a third that he was a simple soul whose simplicity was being taken advantage of by his friends,’ Feofan fully believed in his prophetic gift. ‘In conversation Rasputin revealed not book learning but a subtle grasp of spiritual experience obtained through personal knowledge. And a perspicacity that verged on second sight,’ Feofan testified in the File.
The ‘Black Princesses’
Feofan invited Rasputin to move in with him — to stay at his apartment. Thanks to Feofan, Rasputin soon turned up at one of the most influential Petersburg houses of the day, the palace of Grand Duke Pyotr Nikolaevich, Nicholas II’s cousin.
The Rasputin File Page 7