Episode 268: Grigori Rasputin: The Mad Monk [1]
Hello, hello hello, and welcome to English Learning for Curious Minds, by Leonardo English.
The show where you can listen to fascinating stories, and learn weird and
wonderful things about the world at the same time as improving your English.
I'm Alastair Budge, and today we are going to be talking
about the mysterious life of Grigori Rasputin - The Mad Monk.
He was the peasant who went from a village in Siberia to the centre of the
Russian imperial court, befriending the Tsar and the Tsarina, and playing
a role in the downfall of Russia's longest serving dynasty, The Romanovs.
It's an amazing story that will involve mysticism, kings and
queens, the Russian Orthodox church, sex, violence, war and murder.
So, buckle up, I hope you'll enjoy it.
OK then, Grigori Rasputin.
Now, let's start with a little bit of Russian history for context.
Throughout history, Russia has had two main dynasties: the Rurikids and the Romanovs.
Today we are going to focus on the fall of the Romanov dynasty.
The Romanov family ruled imperial Russia from 1613 until 1917 when a Bolshevik squad murdered the
entire Romanov family, including tsar Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra, and their five children.
At the time of the early 1900s, Russia was one of the poorest countries
in Europe and due to a population, boom, poor working conditions and high
taxes the majority of the Russians lived in a state of extreme poverty.
As living conditions worsened, the Russian working class led a series
of protests against the monarchy and in 1905, the tsar's troops killed
hundreds of protesters in an event called the Bloody Sunday Massacre.
This violent event was the beginning of the start of the Russian Revolution
in which workers went on multiple strikes, further hurting Russia's economy.
In response to the massacre and the strikes, Tsar Nicholas put in place some
political reform, in the form of small representative governments called Dumas, but
he repeatedly abolished these Dumas when they went against him and his influence.
A second revolution happened on March 8, 1917 and four
days later, the Duma established its own government.
Tsar Nicholas was forced to resign from the throne, but
as you might remember, the Duma wasn't in power for long.
In October of the same year, the Bolsheviks occupied
government buildings and overthrew the capitalist government.
The Bolsheviks formed a new government made up of peasants and workers.
A civil war broke out in Russia with the Red Army fighting for the
Bolshevik government, and the White Army fighting for democratic socialism.
In 1923, the civil war ended, the Red Army won, and the Soviet
Union, the world's first communist country, was established.
Grigori Rasputin, our story's protagonist, played an important role in this major
shift in Russian history but to understand how, we have to start from the beginning.
In the year 1869, in the village of Pokrovskoye in
Siberia, an illiterate peasant woman gave birth to a boy.
She called him Grigory Yefimovich Novykh.
Growing up, the boy worked on his family's farm.
He did go to school, but never learned to read or write, he remained illiterate.
As a child, the boy claimed he had visions.
He is also said to have healed a number of horses.
Members of his small town marvelled at his magical abilities but instead of viewing him
as a healer, they believed that he was somehow related to the devil and they avoided him.
The boy claimed that when he got older, he also gained the ability to tell the future.
He was clearly a bit of a wild youth, and was given the name
“Rasputin”, which means “the debauched one”, the “wild” one.
By the age of eighteen, Rasputin got married to a girl from a nearby village,
and together they had seven children, but only three of them survived.
By all reports, his early married life was relatively uneventful.
But in 1897, when he was 28 years old, everything changed.
Rasputin started a spiritual journey, though the reasons for starting it are a little unclear.
According to some, his interest in his religious pilgrimage
was because he wanted to escape punishment for horse theft.
Essentially, he had been caught stealing horses and
turning to religion provided a way of avoiding punishment.
Others say that he had a vision of the Virgin Mary.
Either way, he left his family to go to live in a
monastery in a town several hundred kilometres away
. It was here that he was completely transformed.
Rasputin grew fascinated by an underground, secret
sect of the Russian Orthodox Church called the Khylsts.
The Khylsts believed in “sinning to drive out sin”.
To do this, they often participated in acts that were
considered to be sexually deviant in order to be closer to God.
To put it more bluntly, they would dance, get wild and worked up, then all have sex with each other.
To a man already with a bit of a wild past, and who would later become known for
his voracious sexual appetite, this must have been like opening the doors of heaven.
He embraced this sect completely, and became devoted to this particular part of the church.
Unlike other monks, Rasputin didn't abandon his family; he continued to see his
wife and three children throughout his life, though he had a wild reputation.
Rasputin was known for having many sexual partners and affairs as well as for drinking excessively.
With his rockstar lifestyle and debauched behaviour, he earned the
nickname “Mad Monk” though in reality, he was never technically a monk.
Word of a charismatic holy man started to spread, and Rasputin was invited to
St Petersburg to meet with the city's most powerful bishop, Bishop Theofan.
Rasputin's arrival to the Russian capital, in 1905, came at the right time.
In the early 20th century, people in St Petersburg, like in many
places in Russia, had become superstitious and interested in mysticism.
There was also an increasingly liberal attitude towards sex, and the newspapers at
the time were even publishing adverts for treatments of sexually transmitted diseases.
This fascination with mysticism, coupled with an increasingly free society, sexually at
least, created an environment where Rasputin, this new mystic sex-fueled monk, could thrive.
Rasputin soon became well-known in the city and he gained many followers.
People were obsessed with Rasputin, although I wouldn't
blame you if you find it difficult to understand why.
Physically, he was very dirty, he was completely filthy.
He would rarely wash or brush his teeth, and it was said that he smelled like a goat.
This didn't seem to put off his followers though, especially the female ones.
They would often spend hours bathing him or licking his fingers clean.
As souvenirs, they would collect Rasputin's nail clippings, the
piece of his nails that he cut off, and attach them to their dresses.
As Rasputin's reputation as a mystic grew, Bishop Theophane eventually introduced
Rasputin to the Romanov family, tsar Nicholas II and his wife, tsarina Alexandra.
Nicholas and Alexandra had consulted spiritual advisors similar to Rasputin in the past.
The imperial family had tried to have a male heir, a son,
but for 9 years they only managed to produce daughters.
In 1904, after the birth of four daughters, finally a son arrived, Alexei.
There was a problem though.
He was born with haemophilia, an illness in which blood doesn't clot or come together.
For people suffering from haemophilia at the time, even with
the best doctors in the world, the disease could be fatal.
A small cut could cause you to bleed to death.
The boy's condition was kept secret from everyone apart from their trusted inner circle.
The family was desperate to find a cure and after consulting with
fortune tellers and mediums who claimed to be able to speak to the dead,
tsarina Alexandra found the cure that she had been looking for: Rasputin.
Rasputin was instructed to spend time with the boy, in order to cure him from this illness.
After Rasputin's visit, where he threw away all the medicine the doctors had recommended
and conducted his own treatment on the boy, Alexei miraculously started to get better.
As a result of having cured the only male heir to the Russian
throne, Rasputin soon became the royal family's most trusted advisor.
While many people believed that Rasputin had mystical powers, and indeed
the tsarina certainly thought that Raspuin had performed magic to save her
son's life, there are some logical explanations for his healing abilities.
In fact, it's more about what Rasputin didn't do than what he did do.
Remember, he threw away all of the medicine that the doctors had been prescribing to the boy.
Doctors at that time would most likely would have given Alexei aspirin,
which would have thinned the blood and made it less likely to clot.
It might have been a simple case of good luck, but Rasputin's
distrust of doctors, and his subsequent actions, helped save Alexei.
The family trusted Rasputin and after performing this
miracle, Rasputin secured a place in the imperial family.
He even started to refer to Nicholas and Alexandra as “mama and
papa”, which was particularly strange as Rasputin was only 8 months
younger than Nicholas and actually 3 years older than Alexandra.
Because he was regarded as the saviour of the heir, he gained access to the palace and the family.
He became especially close with Alexandra, who in 1915 was in charge of Russia's
internal affairs, as her husband was leading the Russian war effort in World War One.
Due to Rasputin's sexually promiscuous reputation, many people believe that he and
the tsarina actually had an intimate relationship, that they were sleeping together.
Although there is no evidence to prove this, the
important thing is that the public believed it was true.
Soldiers openly joked about it as if it were a fact, Russian newspapers printed
cartoons suggesting that it was the case, and it was believed to be common knowledge.
While it's not known whether their intimacy extended to the
bedroom, Rasputin and the tsarina were certainly growing closer.
Rasputin went from a mere spiritual advisor to Alexandra, to an advisor on almost everything.
He influenced her decisions when choosing members of the
cabinet and sometimes advised her about military matters.
As Rasputin's political power and influence grew, the Russian elite felt threatened.
After all, he was a filthy, illiterate peasant from
Siberia whose role was supposedly as a mystical healer.
And now there he was whispering in the Tsarina's ear, influencing Russian political decisions.
Secret police began to watch Rasputin and they took note of
his frequent visits to prostitutes, often multiple times a day.
Many people close to the royal family believed that Rasputin was a dangerous
man and that the tsar and the tsarina were foolish to put their trust in him.
Even in the early days of his political influence, Rasputin had plenty of enemies.
In 1914, a year before becoming the tsarina's personal advisor, there was an assassination
attempt made on Rasputin's life by a noseless, peasant woman named Khioniya Guseva.
Guseva was the follower of a man called Iliodor, who was a former priest and supporter of Rasputin
before he grew jealous of Rasputin's relationship with the royal family and he turned against him.
Guseva had listened closely to Iliodor's teaching about
Rasputin, and had decided that Rasputin was a false prophet.
On July 14th, 1914, she waited for Rasputin outside his home in Pokrovskoye.
When he arrived, she stabbed him in the stomach, and went so far as to try
to pull his intestines out of his body while he was lying in front of her.
Somehow, Rasputin survived this attempt on his life but unfortunately
for him, this wouldn't be the last time that someone tried to kill him.
There were several other assassination plots that were discovered before Rasputin's life
was seriously threatened, but in late 1916 fate finally caught up with Grigori Rasputin.
He had made too many enemies, and not enough powerful friends.
