“Rasputin” by Douglas Smith

Just to recap, here is the talk by the author Douglas Smith that I shared pre-emptively in my previous post.

·              Author Douglas Smith: Rasputin - Rancho Mirage Library & Observatory

Smith:  “He was neither the devil, nor was he a saint”

…  and the review by Robert K Massie from the front endsheet. 

“This brilliantly written, meticulously researched account of the life of Rasputin is the best, most complete and accurate I have read.  Step by step, day by day, week by week in this life, Douglas Smith tells the story from its humble beginnings, through its obscene sexual chapters, to its violent end.  He describes how a peasant became “Our Friend” to the last emperor and empress of Russia.  He explains why this dependency came at terrible cost for the imperial couple, for their children, for Russia, and for the twentieth-century world.  Readers will begin by saying that this is an impossible story to believe.  They will read on, because in Douglas Smith’s mesmerizing telling, it must be believed.  And because it did happen.”

Massie is the author of several books on the Romanovs.  I mentioned the ones on Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Nicholas and Alexander and the Romanovs’ Final Chapter.

Douglas Smith’s book “Rasputin” comprises 74 chapters plus Epilogue in 680 pages, following by over 30 pages of Bibliography and almost 70 pages of detailed chapter by chapter Notes, and a further 30 page Index.  So as Massie’s review states, it is meticulously researched. 

The book can be borrowed here on Archive (I don’t know how the Archive borrowing option actually works)

I also found an epub version here.

Here is another overview of the book:

https://douglassmith.info/books/rasputin/

RASPUTIN

Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs

Published on the centenary of the death of Rasputin, this is the definitive biography that will dramatically change our understanding of this fascinating figure.

A hundred years after his murder, Rasputin continues to excite the popular imagination as the personification of evil.  Numerous biographies, novels, and films recount his mysterious rise to power as Nicholas and Alexandra’s confidant and the guardian of the sickly heir to the Russian throne.  His debauchery and sinister political influence are the stuff of legend, and the downfall of the Romanov dynasty was laid at his feet.

But as the prizewinning historian Douglas Smith shows, the true story of Rasputin’s life and death has remained shrouded in myth.  A major new work that combines probing scholarship and powerful storytelling, “Rasputin” separates fact from fiction to reveal the real life of one of history’s most alluring figures.  Drawing on a wealth of forgotten documents from archives in seven countries, Smith presents Rasputin in all his complexity – man of God, voice of peace, loyal subject, adulterer, drunkard.  “Rasputin” is not just a definitive biography of an extraordinary and legendary man but a fascinating portrait of the twilight of imperial Russia as it lurched toward catastrophe.”

In this Mention I am just going to focus on three chapters that piqued my particular interest (as in aroused, not irritated).

·              7.  Mad Monk

·              4.  Monsieur Philippe

·              11.  Demons of the Silver Age – Spiritualism

Chapter 7. The Mad Monk

At the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary Rasputin met another churchman who was to become one of his greatest allies and one of his greatest enemies.  Sergei Trufanov, born in 1880 into a Cossack family along the Don River in southern Russia, lived a life almost as unbelievable as Rasputin’s.  He entered the seminary in 1901 and became a protégé of Feofan and Bishop Sergei, under whom he was ordained as the monk Iliodor in November 1903. After graduating from the seminary in the summer of 1905, Iliodor was appointed instructor of homiletics at the Yaroslavl Theological Academy and then sent to teach at the Novgorod Seminary in 1906 before being transferred later that year to the Pochaevskaya Lavra in western Ukraine.

The quick succession of posts was not the result of promotions, but a symptom of Iliodor’s rebellious nature.  The local press in Pochaevsk had this to say about the young monk: “This remarkable man, almost still a boy, with his gentle, pretty, feminine face yet powerful will, immediately attracts crowds of common people wherever he appears.  His passionate, inspired words about God, love for the tsar and the fatherland make a deep impression on the masses and light in them the hunger for heroic deeds.”

[…]

His 1906 brochure When Will This Finally End? , addressed directly to the tsar, offers a picture of Iliodor’s Russia. The country, he cried, was being ruined by Jews, journalists, the Duma, and the “criminal humanity” of Russia’s legal system.  The End of Times is nearly at hand, he warned: “We strongly believe and adamantly preach that the time of the Antichrist shall someday come to Holy Russia.”  Russia can be saved, it is not too late, Iliodor assured his readers, but the tsar must act and act firmly: violence is the only answer.  The death penalty must be reinstated.  Anyone who dares to insult the name of God must be “executed in the most ferocious manner.”  Russia’s courts must be returned to their traditional role as “the shortest path to the gallows, the axe, and the bullet.”  And such punishment ought to be meted out not just to criminals, but also “slanderers, lying newspapermen, and instigators!”  Throughout the land, and especially at the imperial court, “everyone in whose veins flows foreign blood” is to be rounded up and banished from Russia.  The door to the West that Peter the Great opened two centuries before needs to be slammed shut and for good.  To aid the tsar in this epochal struggle, Iliodor placed himself before Nicholas as his most devoted subject, ready to wash from Russia every last vestige of the West.  With him, he bragged to the tsar, marched an army not of Black Hundreds, but Black Millions: “We are not the black hundreds, we are millions, we are the black millions, indeed tens of millions.”

[Interjection: So much more could be said about Peter The Great’s mysterious ‘Grand Embassy’ and his enigmatic ‘modernisation’ of Russia - or should we say ‘Westernisation’.  Matthew Raphael Johnson has quite a bit to say about this period of modernisation and suggests quite convincingly that Peter was indoctrinated into Freemasonry, from which roots the vision for the establishment of Petersburg arose.  But that’s too much of a digression here.]

His former patron Archbishop Antony (Alexei Khrapovitsky) had to admit Iliodor had fallen into the grips of “hysterical insanity.”  Lenin, however, saw something greater at work, describing Iliodor as the expression of something new in Russia—“dark, peasant democracy of the crudest but deepest kind.” 4 The official church was not ready for any peasant democracy (dark or otherwise) and Iliodor became a constant source of trouble. At Yaroslavl, he clashed with the rector, Father Yevsevy (Yevstafy Grozdov), who opposed the Union of Russian People, which led to his transfer to Novgorod. This would become a pattern throughout Iliodor’s life for the next several years as he was moved from place to place, threatened with punishment, and closely monitored until a few years later Iliodor himself renounced his faith in a flash of rage.

[Interjection: Today’s United Russia Party is very pro-Putin – not suggesting there is any direct correlation.]

The Mad Monk of Russia was the title Iliodor gave to his autobiography. Imbued with the same paranoid megalomania as all his writings, it is a strange mix of fact, error, and shameless lies that proved hugely influential in establishing the myth of Rasputin as the “Holy Devil” of Russia.  He wrote it after having fled Russia following a failed attempt on Rasputin’s life. Unable to kill Rasputin, Iliodor set out to destroy him in print.

[Interjection: Maybe Nicholas should have listened to Iliodor before the latter he lost his cool in frustration, especially in regard to the death penalty for violent revolutionaries and traitors.   After all, those very revolutionaries had no compunction in imposing the death penalty on a mass scale for anyone suspected to be ‘counter-revolutionary.]

[…]

Iliodor would outlive Rasputin by over three decades, but he would never escape his shadow.

Chapter 4. Monsieur Philippe

[…]

Back in France Papus introduced Count Valerian Muravyov-Amursky, a Russian military agent, to a mysterious Frenchman by the name of Monsieur Philippe then taking high society by storm. “He is a sage,” Papus exclaimed. “He speaks and the great secret of his power resides in his every word.”  His full name was Philippe Nazier-Vachot (also given as Anthèlme Nizier Philippe or Nizier-Anthèlme Vachod). Born in Savoy in 1849 to a family of peasants, Philippe was apprenticed to his uncle’s butcher shop and then moved to Lyon to study medicine as a young man. Whether he left the university willingly or was expelled, Philippe never did receive his medical degree, but this did little to stop his career. From the age of thirteen, so Philippe claimed, he had possessed rare healing powers, and after leaving university he dedicated himself to developing his gifts, delving deeply into the occult, hypnotism, and, some alleged, magic. In 1881, he set up his own laboratory and began accepting patients, treating them with a variety of techniques and substances, including what he called “psychic fluids and astral forces.” No European institution would give him a diploma, but, according to one account, he did submit in 1884 a dissertation titled “Principles of Hygiene Applicable in Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infancy” to the University of Cincinnati.  Diploma or not, Monsieur Philippe’s fame quickly spread across France and he won a large number of followers among the elite. Although not much to look at—a thick figure of about average height with dark hair, an exaggerated mustache, and heavily lidded eyes—those who had seen him raved of “son charme.” The press hailed him as the “Cagliostro of our age.”

[Interjection: “Cagliostro of our age” … WOW!!  There’s a rabbit hole worth pursuing!]

One witness to a séance noted his great effect on women.

[Interjection: we’re talking about Philippe here, not Rasputin]

He went about the room, his slippers embroidered with a dog smoking a pipe, to greet everyone by a gentle clasping of the hands. Next, each woman came up and whispered in his ear with “un air de confiance amoureuse.” He told them he had little time to devote to each one of them, but that if they truly believed, they would all be healed. He then smiled at the women and they seemed to practically float off the floor under his spell. Next, he spoke to those gathered in vague terms about God and Magnetism and how he was a mere nothing, words which only seemed to convince his listeners even more firmly of his unique powers. Count Amursky attended one of Philippe’s séances in Paris held on the anniversary of the execution of King Louis XVI. It was quite the event: Philippe called forth the king’s spirit and to everyone’s astonishment, a gruesome head dripping blood from its severed neck miraculously appeared in the air of the darkened room and then, before they knew it, vanished into darkness.

It was perhaps through Count Amursky that the Black Princesses made Philippe’s acquaintance in early 1900. Stana turned to him for help with her migraines and Militsa and Pyotr for treatment of their ill son Roman. They were all so impressed with Philippe that they invited him back to Russia with the thought of introducing him at court and particularly to the empress.   The sisters were among the few at court to open their arms to Alexandra upon her arrival in Russia. They went out of their way to make her feel loved and welcome and made certain to pay her the respect she demanded. Militsa loved to talk to Alexandra about the world of the occult and mysticism. She spoke convincingly of true men of God, of prophets and seers from the humble folk, and convinced the empress such men were real and walked among them, men free of the vanity and corruption of court and fashionable society. Militsa insisted not only on the reality of the Antichrist, but that his forces were present in contemporary society. Alexandra listened to this, and she believed. According to Anna Vyrubova, the empress’s closest friend, Alexandra considered Militsa practically a “prophetess” and hung on her every word. Militsa even managed to convince Alexandra that the Queen of Italy, the Black Crows’ sister Elena, had been possessed by an evil spirit.  Upon their return from France, the sisters told the royal couple about the remarkable man they had met while abroad and of their wish to present him to their majesties.

Nicholas recorded their first meeting in his diary on 26 March 1901: “I met with one remarkable Frenchman Mr Philippe! We talked for a long time.” Philippe stayed in Russia for about three months and then returned for a second visit in July. Nicholas and Alexandra went to see him on the ninth, the very day of his arrival, and spent the evening with Philippe and the Black Princesses, Pyotr, and Nikolasha at Znamenka. They listened to their exotic visitor for hours, utterly enraptured by his words. Nicholas and Alexandra went to see him again the following night. “What miraculous hours!” the emperor noted in his diary after his second evening with Philippe. On the eleventh, Philippe lunched with the royal family. He spent a long time conversing alone with Alexandra and then was presented to the couple’s four girls, including the infant Anastasia born the previous month. “We showed him our daughters,” an ecstatic Nicholas wrote, “and prayed together with him in the bedroom!” By now they were already calling him “Our Friend.” Nicholas and Alexandra saw Philippe every day until his departure for home on 21 July.

Nicholas was particularly drawn to Philippe. He went to visit him at Znamenka on the twelfth and the two sat alone for over three hours. “The ways of the Lord are inscrutable!” he noted in his diary after returning to the palace. The Frenchman was forever on their minds. On the fifteenth they left a theater performance at the intermission to see him and ended up listening to Philippe’s words until 2:30 in the morning. Philippe would speak for hours of the wonders of God, at times reaching the height of religious ecstasy before his rapt audience. They rushed through their official commitments so as to have as much time with him as possible. These visits were the highlight of their day. The tsar even invited Philippe to join him at public ceremonies, as on the fourteenth when Nicholas reviewed the troops at nearby Krasnoe Selo and again at a ceremonial march there on the seventeenth. On the evening of the eighteenth, they had an “important conversation,” in Nicholas’s words, at Znamenka and prayed with him two nights later. Nicholas and Alexandra saw Philippe off late on the afternoon of the twenty-first. “We all feel as if we’ve been orphaned!” a despondent Nicholas remarked that evening in his diary. On his next visit to Znamenka eight days later Nicholas found it “strange” not to see “Our Friend” there.

[Interjection: So Nicholas and Alexander called Philippe “Our Friend” long before they applied this term of endearment to Rasputin.]

Even though Philippe was gone, his influence remained. Alexandra wrote to Nicholas on 27 August after the tsar had sailed off on the imperial yacht Standart to meet Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany at Danzig for discussions on the Far East (Wilhelm was seeking Russian support) and to observe German naval maneuvers: “My thoughts and prayers will be with you the whole time. And I know this is also true for Mr P[hilippe], and this alone comforts me, for else the separation would be too horrible. [. . .] Don’t forget, Saturday evening around 10:30—all our thoughts shall take flight for Lyon. How rich our lives have become since we met him, and it seems that everything has become much easier to bear.”

From Danzig, Nicholas left for France, traveling with the French President Émile Loubet by train to Compiègne, northeast of Paris, where he was joined by Alexandra. There, on 6 September, Philippe paid them a surprise visit. Nicholas and Alexandra saw him again the next day, when they were introduced to his son-in-law Dr. Emmanuel Henri Lalande, the author of occult books under the pen name “Marc Haven.” During his stay Nicholas brought up Philippe in a conversation with French Minister of Foreign Affairs Théophile Delcassé and urged the minister to grant his friend a French medical diploma. Delcassé, as well as Loubet, was shocked by the tsar’s request, as well as by the adamancy with which it was delivered. To them Philippe was nothing but a charlatan. Nicholas’s request was ignored.

Important conversations. Prayer sessions. Requests of the president of France. It was clear from the beginning how great an effect Monsieur Philippe had had on Nicholas and Alexandra. This was no amusing diversion from the burdens of rule. Quite the opposite. In their new friend, the emperor and empress had found someone who could help shoulder the burden. Philippe had made himself into one of the tsar’s chief confidants practically overnight, and he was apparently using this authority to offer advice on how to rule.

[… so it appears that much of what is attributed to Rasputin was actually more truthfully relevant to Philippe.]

The rest of this chapter is so intriguing – so many twists and turns - but that is enough for this Mention; I have to stop here and move on to my final excerpt.

Chapter 11. Demons of the Silver Age [- Spiritualism]

The turn of the century was a period of intense spiritual searching in Russia. Intellectuals turned away from the materialist positivism of the nineteenth century and back to the church and other forms of spiritualism in what can be called a true religious renaissance. Many sought to revitalize what was widely perceived as a hidebound, bureaucratic, and spiritually dead official Russian Orthodox Church, to infuse it with a renewed sense of mystery, fervency, and life, while others rejected the church altogether for new forms of spiritual experience that held out the promise of even more powerful encounters with the sacred.

Emblematic of the age was the Religious-Philosophical Society, founded by the writers Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Zinaida Gippius, and Dmitry Filosofov in 1901 in St. Petersburg. They became known as the Bogoiskateli - God-seekers. Merezhkovsky fashioned himself into a prophet and wanted to create a new religion based on the idea that the Second Coming of Christ was imminent and with it a new Third Testament.

During what became known as Russia’s Silver Age, from roughly 1890 to 1914, a period that overlaps almost exactly with the rise and fall of Rasputin, the country’s educated classes exhibited a fascination for mysticism and the occult and all manner of the supernatural, from table turning, hypnotism, and chiromancy, to Rosicrucianism, fortune-telling, and telepathy. It was the age of Theosophy, the creation of the Russian-born Helena Blavatsky, a supposed secret doctrine, part Gnostic gospel, part Buddhism, that claimed to synthesize the ancient wisdom once common to all the world’s civilizations and that held out the promise of a universal brotherhood.

[They like to project Madame Blavatsky’s Theosophy onto Hitler … Nonsense!]

Theosophy’s mystic charms attracted many of Russia’s leading creative figures—philosophers Vladimir Solovyov and Nikolai Berdyaev, poets and writers Konstantin Balmont and Andrei Bely, the composer Alexander Scriabin, and the artist Vasily Kandinsky. It was the age of Spiritualism, founded in Hydesville, New York in 1848 by the sisters Kate and Margaret Fox, that offered the possibility to communicate with the dead through the help of special “mediums.” Spiritualism swept across America, England (Queen Victoria and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were believers), Germany, and Russia, as people flocked to séances to try to make contact with their lost loved ones, their spirits manifesting themselves by rapping, spectral voices, automatic writing, and even ectoplasmic materialization. So popular did these séances become that the Imperial University in St. Petersburg established the “Scientific Commission for the Study of Mediumistic Phenomena,” led by the chemist Dmitry Mendeleev, father of the periodic table.

[Well I don’t know about you, but who’d have thought we would be studying the Periodic Table in an article about Rasputin? ]

My final comment … 

All humans are frail and vulnerable, and influenced by people around them, even Empresses and Emperors.  For whatever reason, Alexandra in particular was taken in by the likes of Monsieur Philippe and Iliodore/Illyodore.  In her case, it was firstly, concern for her maternal responsibility to produce a male heir (Monsieur Philippe), and secondly, once Alexei had been born, to preserve his health (Rasputin).

Alexandra and Nicholas were so pious that they sought out, and were even swayed by anyone they believed was giving them the best of “God’s advice”.  They were susceptible to being persuaded by a ‘spiritual personal trainer, so to speak’.

Even Rasputin can be included in this category.  The question is, was his advice sincere and genuine, or as the tenured academics would have us believe, sinister.  Certainly Alexandra believed that Rasputin was vital to Alexei’s health through the power of prayer.

Quoting ahead from my next intended article on Rasputin – from Maria Rasputin’s “My Father”

Before my father came, Illyodore had enjoyed a certain amount of prestige in Court circles, and it was at his instigation that the practice of spiritualism became popular. A terrible wave of spiritualism inundated certain circles. Occultists famous in other countries of Europe were brought to St. Petersburg, and even the Empress, in her maternal anxiety, had had recourse to table­ turning for advice on the bringing-up and treatment to be followed for her children, and also in order to be able to distinguish her true friends from those who, under a cloak of apparent devotion, betrayed her.

After my father had obtained a certain influence over the Tsarina, he openly opposed all these spiritualistic practices. " I do not know if it is true or false,” he said, " but if there is something in it, it comes from the Devil, and should be left alone.” And little by little the Tsarina and her following renounced these practices. Illyodore was exceedingly vexed at this, and his vexation soon turned into hatred of my father. He was a man so nervously constituted as to be almost unbalanced. " In my opinion, he was not normal," wrote Madame Wyroubova in her memoirs.