Chapter 1The Tura

Foreword

The most detailed documentation of any life in late imperial Russia was compiled by men whose promotion depended on finding something.

From 1914 the Okhrana kept a watch on the staircase of Grigori Rasputin's flat in Petrograd: who climbed it, at what hour, in what condition. The ledgers survive. They are extraordinary, they are the foundation of half the modern literature, and they record arrivals rather than acts.

That is the shape of this entire subject, and this book is built to handle it.

The argument is that Rasputin's importance was never proportional to his power, and that this is the interesting fact about him rather than a debunking of it.

A Siberian peasant with a genuine religious vocation and an appetite he never disciplined walked into a capital that was already hungry for exactly him. The Russian educated class had spent a century arguing about whether the truth of Russia lived in the village or in Petersburg. The court had already taken up a French mystic from Lyon before he arrived. And there was a convert Empress with a hemophiliac son and nobody left to ask.

What Rasputin actually did for Alexei cannot be established. Chapter 5 sets out what happened at Spala in October 1912 — a boy bleeding into his thigh after a jolting carriage ride, last rites prepared, bulletins issued to the empire, a telegram from Pokrovskoye, and a recovery — and gives three explanations, and declines to choose among them.

What it does establish is what Alexandra concluded, and that is the fact that changed history.

Ten chapters of this book track something that can be documented precisely, which is the manufacture of the figure.

In 1912 Alexander Guchkov circulated copies of the Empress's letters to Rasputin among Duma politicians, reading them where they would be repeated, and the press did the rest. That is where the public Rasputin is born, assembled out of private paper by people who wanted a weapon against the throne.

In the same period Sergei Trufanov — Iliodor, the firebrand monk of Tsaritsyn who had built Rasputin's reputation among the faithful and then set out to demolish it — was defrocked, fled abroad, and wrote a book called The Holy Devil.

Nearly every famous Rasputin anecdote in general circulation descends from a book written expressly to destroy him. Chapter 9 teaches the reader how to check a source for motive before believing it, and the rest of the book applies the lesson.

Then the bread queues. In 1915 and 1916 the rumor was being consumed in the street: soldiers' letters opened by the censors, obscene postcards for sale, the Empress spoken of in the lines simply as the German woman, and a settled conviction that she and the peasant were arranging a separate peace with Berlin.

And on 1 November 1916, in the State Duma, Pavel Milyukov itemized the government's failures and asked after each one whether this was stupidity or treason, while the chamber shouted back both. The censor banned publication, which guaranteed circulation: typed copies went hand to hand through the ministries and out to the front.

Milyukov later conceded that he could not fully evidence what he had alleged.

That is the moment liberal Russia adopted a conspiracy theory because it was useful, and the myth — not the man — is what helped bring down a dynasty.

The last five chapters are the killing and its consequences, and they are five because the murder settled nothing.

On the night of 16 to 17 December 1916 he was killed in a cellar on the Moika by a prince, a Duma deputy, a grand duke, a doctor and a lieutenant. The regime the killing was meant to save survived him by ten weeks. The men who did it to save it were exiled by it first.

Chapter 18 tells that night twice, from Yusupov's account and from Purishkevich's, because they do not agree, and the chapter's discipline is to hold both up without resolving them.

Chapter 19 is the autopsy, and it destroys most of the story. No poison in the body. No water in the lungs, so he did not drown. Three gunshot wounds, one of them to the forehead at close range. And none of the mutilation the rumors promised.

The original report did not survive. What this book actually has is the pathologist's later account of what he found — and saying so is the method turned on the single best piece of evidence in the case.

Chapter 21 is the methodological climax and it is about an archive everybody trusts.

In 1917 the Provisional Government's Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry took testimony from the fallen regime's ministers, courtiers and police chiefs. It is the most authoritative-looking body of evidence about Rasputin's power in existence, it has been quoted as neutral for a century, and every witness in it had precisely the same interest: to make a dead peasant the author of decisions they had signed themselves.

Two conventions, stated once.

Every date in this book is Old Style unless it is flagged. Russia was thirteen days behind the rest of Europe until 1918, and a book that mixes the calendars silently will have the stabbing of June 1914 appear to precede Sarajevo, and the burial of 21 December 1916 drift into the following January two chapters after the murder.

And there is a body of 1920s conspiracy literature that made Rasputin a Jewish agent, and a counter-literature that made him a Jewish protector. Both are named in this book as propaganda and characterized, and the content of neither is reproduced as narrative.

He was born at Pokrovskoye in Tobolsk province on 9 January 1869, which the parish register fixes and which four different years in the standard books do not.

His daughter Maria danced in cabarets, worked a circus cage and a wartime rivet gun, and died in Los Angeles in 1977 on Social Security.

And in Russian Orthodox nationalist circles there has been a campaign to have him canonized as a martyr, which the Patriarchate has refused.

A country that needed to invent him has begun to want him back.

Chapter 1 · The Tura

Beyond the Urals the country flattens out and then goes on flattening, and it does not stop for anything a traveler can hold in his head. This is western Siberia. In the nineteenth century it was the part of the Russian Empire that had least succeeded in becoming the Russian Empire. There were governors and there were garrisons and there was a post road, and along the post road the state was a real thing, with a face and a signature and the power to take a man away. Off the road it thinned. It thinned by the mile, and then by the day's travel, and out where the villages sat with their backs to the forest the state was less an authority than a season — something that arrived, took what it had come for, and went away again until the next time.

What held the country together, insofar as anything did, was water. The rivers of western Siberia are the roads of western Siberia; they carried the grain and the furs and the fish and the post and the priests, and in winter, frozen hard, they carried the sledges too, so that the road and the river were the same object twice a year in two different states of matter. Settlement followed the water because there was no other logic available. Villages strung themselves along the banks in a thin line, each one a day or two from the next, and between them was space of a kind that western Europe had forgotten how to imagine.

Distance of that order does something to administration that no reform can undo. An order issued in the capital had to survive the journey, and the journey was long enough that a good deal did not survive it. Officials who went out to Siberia went out knowing they would be watched by nobody, and the peasants they governed knew it too. The empire was not absent — it collected, it conscripted, it registered, and when it decided to notice a man it could ruin him without explaining itself — but it operated at intervals, and in the intervals people arranged their own affairs. That is not a romantic proposition about free Siberians. It is a practical statement about the reach of an eighteenth-century bureaucracy running a nineteenth-century landmass with couriers and horses.

On one of those rivers, the Tura, on the road that ran from Tyumen down toward Tobolsk, stood a village called Pokrovskoye. It was a village of a few hundred households. It had land, and the land was worked; it had a parish, and the parish kept its books; it had the river in front of it and the country behind it. Nothing about it recommended itself to history. In the ordinary course of things a place like Pokrovskoye enters the record twice — once when it is taxed and once when it burns — and otherwise leaves no trace at all beyond the entries a parish priest makes in a ledger when a child is born, married, or buried.

The interesting fact about Siberian religion is that the thinness of the state was also the thinness of the Church. Parishes were far apart and priests were few, and a priest with a district measured in days of travel cannot supervise what his parishioners believe. Into that space came other things. Old Believers had been going into the Siberian distances for generations, people who had refused the corrected service books and gone on making the sign of the cross the old way, and who understood the official Church not as their mother but as the thing that had come after them. And alongside them, in the same space and often indistinguishable from them to an outsider, came the unlicensed preachers: men without rank, without seminary, without permission, who read aloud and prayed aloud and gathered people into rooms.

The Old Believers were not a curiosity, whatever the phrase suggests. They were a large body of Russians who had refused a reform of their own Church — the correction of the service books, the alteration of the form in which a Russian made the sign of the cross — and who understood those corrections not as the repair of small errors but as the substitution of one religion for another, by an administration with no business inside a prayer. The state took the side of the reform and used what a state uses. The refusers went where the state was thinnest, which is to say east, generation after generation, until there were districts in Siberia where the old rite was simply what people did.

Generations of that leave a habit of mind behind them. These were not irreligious people; they were people for whom the official Church was the institution that had taken their religion away, and who had learned to hold a faith without it — to keep the books themselves, say the prayers themselves, recognize holiness in a neighbor rather than receive it from a consistory. A village did not have to be an Old Believer village to be shaped by the ones around it. The proposition that a man might have the truth of God without anyone's permission was not exotic in that country. It was ordinary, and it was old, and a boy grew up inside it.

This mattered enormously and it is easy to underrate. Russian Orthodoxy was a state church, administered by a Synod, staffed by an ordained clergy whose careers ran through consistories and bishops' offices. But Russian religion — the thing people actually did — had never been confined to it. There was a long-standing understanding, in the villages more than in the capital, that holiness could arrive from outside the hierarchy, and might even be more trustworthy for having done so. The provincial Church knew this and did not like it, and it had a standard instrument for dealing with a preacher it could not otherwise touch: the accusation of sectarianism, of belonging to one of the underground communities whose practices could be described, by anyone who wished to describe them that way, as obscene. That accusation would be made against the man born in Pokrovskoye, twice, by his own Church, and it is the subject of a later chapter. What belongs here is the landscape it came out of. He did not invent the role he would play. The role was waiting, and it was old.

His parents were Efim and Anna Rasputin. That is close to the whole of what the record establishes about them with confidence, and a biography ought to say so at the point where a lesser one would start filling in. We do not know what was said in that house. We do not know what the boy was like, what he was afraid of, when he first prayed on his own account or what he thought he was doing when he did. The interior life of a child in a Siberian village in the eighteen-seventies is not recoverable, and no honest method recovers it.

Everything that purports to describe it was written afterward, and written by people who already knew what he became. The devotional accounts make the child a saint in miniature, marked out early, gifted with sight. The hostile accounts make him a thief and a drunk before he was grown, and they were composed by men with a specific interest in establishing that the rot went all the way down. Both kinds are retrospective. Both are shaped, at every sentence, by the ending. A reader is entitled to be told which parts of a life are evidence and which are the ending working backward, and this part is the ending working backward. The village childhood of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin is a blank that the twentieth century filled in twice, in opposite directions, and this book is going to leave it blank.

What is not blank is the register. Somewhere in the parish books of Pokrovskoye there is an entry recording the birth of a son to Efim and Anna, and the date it carries is 9 January 1869, Old Style. That entry is the ground floor of the modern biography. It was established from the Pokrovskoye parish register and published by Douglas Smith in 2016, in the first life of Rasputin built on sustained work in the Russian state and provincial archives after they opened — and the first thirty years of that life were rebuilt, essentially, out of paper of exactly this kind: parish registers, consistory papers, local police records, held in the regional archives at Tobolsk and Tyumen. It is unglamorous material. It is also the only material about the Siberian decades that was not composed by somebody with an argument to make.

A parish register was not a private devotional object, whatever a modern reader hears in the phrase "church record." It was the empire's registry office. There was no civil registration in a Siberian village; the state learned that a subject existed because a priest wrote him down, in a standard book, kept because the government required it. The volume that recorded a baptism was the volume from which a tax roll could be built and a conscription list drawn. There is an irony in that. The thin state — the one that arrived like a season and went away again — did its most durable record-keeping through the Church, because the parish book was the one place where a life was written down as it happened rather than reconstructed later. The document fixing the origin of the most notorious embarrassment the official Church would ever produce was compiled by that Church for the government's convenience.

Notice, too, how little it says. An entry of this kind gives a date, a name, and two parents. It does not describe a household — whether the family was prosperous or poor, devout or indifferent, easy or violent. It is the least eloquent document imaginable, and the inarticulacy is why it can be trusted: nothing in it was chosen, because a clerk filling a column has no thesis.

Consider what the register replaced. Before that archival work, almost nothing about the first thirty years was reliable, and the standard books did not agree on the year he was born. Four different years circulate in the older literature: 1863, 1864, 1865, and 1872. That is a spread of nine years — 1872 against 1863 — inside the most basic fact a biography can be asked for. It is not a rounding error and it is not a quibble. Nine years is the difference between a young man and a middle-aged one at every subsequent moment in the story. Every sentence that ever began "at the age of" in a book about Rasputin was, until recently, resting on a number that four different reputable accounts had set four different ways.

Take that spread at one point in the story and it stops being an abstraction. On the November evening in 1905 when Nicholas II first received him, the man in the room was thirty-six years old, because he had been born in 1869. Had 1863 been the true year he would have been forty-two. Had 1872 been the true year he would have been thirty-three. Those are three different men. A wanderer of thirty-three admitted to a palace is a young man being taken up; one of forty-two is arriving late, with most of a life behind him and his character long since set.

The same distortion runs backward into Siberia. He walked off his own land and onto the road around 1897, and the register makes him twenty-eight in that year — a married man with a child, leaving in the middle of his working life. Under the latest of the discarded years, 1872, he is twenty-five; under the earliest, 1863, he is thirty-four. The act changes meaning with each, and the most important decision of his life cannot be interpreted at all until the year of his birth is fixed.

That the error survived so long tells you what the sources were. The Rasputin the English-speaking world knows was assembled from memoirs written by people who had a stake in him — a defrocked monk who set out to destroy the reputation he had helped to build, an empress's friend defending the household, a murderer explaining himself, a daughter defending her father — and from a body of interpretive writing built on top of those memoirs. The founding text of the legend in the West appeared in the nineteen-twenties, and the version that fixed the popular English-language Rasputin appeared in the nineteen-sixties. A reader today who thinks he knows this story almost certainly knows a version assembled in 1927 and polished in 1964. Neither of those books could have consulted a Siberian parish register. Neither knew what year the man was born.

So the method of this book is set in its first pages, and it is set by a ledger in a village church. Where there is a document, we will say what it establishes and who compiled it and why. Where there is only testimony, we will name the witness and the witness's interest before we report a word of it. And where the record stops — as it stops on the childhood, and as it will stop again, harder, on the decade he spent walking — the book will say that it stops, rather than dressing the hole in adjectives. This is not modesty. It is the only way to write about a man whose entire posthumous existence has consisted of other people's certainty.

There is one more thing to settle before the story can start, and it has to be settled out loud, because a book meant to be read aloud cannot settle it in a footnote.

Imperial Russia kept the Julian calendar. The rest of Europe had moved to the Gregorian, and the two do not agree. The gap was not fixed, either, which is the trap. Take the two dates that bracket this life. He was born on 9 January 1869 by the Russian calendar and on 21 January 1869 by the Western one: a difference of twelve days. He was killed on 17 December 1916 by the Russian calendar and on 30 December 1916 by the Western one: a difference of thirteen. Same man, same two calendars, two different offsets, because the discrepancy widens as the centuries pass. Russia ran thirteen days behind the West by the end, and stayed there until the calendars were reconciled in 1918.

The consequences of not saying which calendar you are using are not pedantic; they are narrative, and they can invert a sequence of events in a reader's ear. Rasputin was stabbed at his own gate in Pokrovskoye on 29 June 1914, Old Style, which is 12 July 1914 in the Western reckoning. Put the first of those dates into a paragraph that has just dated the assassination at Sarajevo in the Western style, and the summer of 1914 assembles itself wrongly — the knife and the archduke land thirteen days out of true, and a reader forms an impression of cause and sequence that the actual chronology does not support. The same trap sits at the other end. He was buried four days after he was shot, on 21 December 1916 by the Russian calendar; render that one date in the Western style and the burial moves into 1917, into a different year from the murder, with no more time having passed than the four days that actually passed.

Therefore: every date in this book is Old Style unless it is expressly marked New Style. Where a date matters to the reader's sense of the wider European story — the war, Sarajevo, the abdication as the world outside Russia experienced it — both forms will be given, in that order, and named. This rule will be stated once more, in the chapter where the body goes into the ground, because that is the place it has to earn its keep. Otherwise it simply runs, silently, under everything that follows. It is a small piece of housekeeping and it is worth the paragraph, because a mixed calendar in a life this contested does not produce confusion so much as false meaning, and false meaning is the one thing this subject has never been short of.

So: a village of a few hundred households on the Tura, on the road between Tyumen and Tobolsk, in a province the empire administered rather than inhabited. A parish church with a book in it. A household that farmed. A boy born in the depth of a Siberian January, in the year 1869, whose birth was recorded because births were recorded, and about whom nothing else was recorded for a very long time.

Two thousand miles west, the empire that would eventually come looking for him was already arguing with itself about what it was. For a century the educated classes of St Petersburg and Moscow had been conducting a quarrel — in novels, in journals, in salons, at unbearable length and with complete sincerity — over whether the truth about Russia lived in Europe or in the village. Whether the country's soul was a thing to be modernized or a thing to be knelt in front of. Whether the peasant was a problem to be solved, a burden to be carried, or the only Russian left who had not been spoiled. The argument was conducted almost entirely by people who had never spent a night in a house like the one on the Tura, and it went on being conducted, and it was still going on, unresolved and increasingly urgent, when a man out of Pokrovskoye finally walked into a Petersburg drawing room and was received as an answer to it.

That is the shape of what follows, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset, because it is the argument of this book and not a twist to be withheld. Grigori Rasputin held no office. He commanded nothing. He was almost certainly never in a position to decide anything of importance. He is nevertheless among the handful of names most commonly blamed for the collapse of a three-hundred-year empire — and when men who believed exactly that finally killed him to save the monarchy, the monarchy outlived him by ten weeks. The gap between what the man could do and what his name was made to carry is not an embarrassment to be cleared away before the real story begins. It is the story. The question is not whether he was a holy man or a fraud, which is unanswerable and would not much matter if it were answered. The question is why a collapsing empire needed him to exist, and what it cost to invent him.

He was, first, a peasant on a Siberian river, in a village the state could not fully police, in a country that had a place ready for men who left. Everything else was done to him, or with his name, by other people.