One of the great `ifs' of history is how Russia would have gone on or developed if she had not been defeated in the first World War, or - better still - had never been drawn into it in the first place. Ever since then it has been mostly a chain of disasters, ending in the present dismemberment and demoralisation of what was once a great imperial power. Could the Romanov dynasty have been saved, and was it worth saving? Would constitutional monarchy, or rather a constitutional empire, have worked politically? Or was what happened to Russia merely the inevitable outcome of all that had gone before?
The strange role of Grigory Efimovitch Rasputin in the collapse of the Czarist regime is well known and even seems inseparable from it. Yet Rasputin himself remains an enigma, mainly because he was in fact personally enigmatic and even - particularly to a Westerner - virtually incomprehensible in his extremist psychology and his whole deeply riven, orgiastic character. However, Dostoevsky would no doubt have understood him, and indeed whole episodes in this absorbing book read rather like a combination of The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov. Rasputin seems to have combined in himself two favourite though opposing Russian roles, those of the Holy Fool and the cunning peasant. He was born in a Siberian village in 1869 and as a young man was drunken, lascivious, unreliable and given to bad company.
Yet he married and had a family, and, more important in the long run, he grew compulsively addicted to religious wanderings and pilgrimages and became a kind of lay monk. It was at this early stage of his career as an itinerant preacher and prophet that he appears to have become involved in the rather mysterious, semi-underground sect known as Khlysty.
Relatively little is known about this heretical cult, which seems to have combined elements from older, orgiastic pagan practices with a crude and populist form of Christianity. Stress was laid on penitence, but also on ecstatic communal rites and dancing, sometimes climaxed by group copulation. Throughout his career, even when he had been espoused by prominent Russian Orthodox clerics, Rasputin was to have the allegation of being a Khlyst thrown at him. There were even some official inquiries, but in his later years the findings of these were quashed or buried by higher authority and by influential well-wishers. By that time, the former wandering, wastrel monk had become a political power in the land.
Rasputin was already into middle age when he came to the attention of Czar Nicholas and his German wife Alexandra (Alix). He had oddly assorted sponsors in St Petersburg - the Bishop Feofan (an early admirer who later denounced him bitterly as immoral), certain Montenegrin princesses who were close to the imperial family, and a highly influential intimate of the Empress named Vyrubova, a plump woman with neither looks nor birth nor culture, but with an astonishing capacity for backstage intrigue and manoeuvre. His role in allegedly curing the haemophiliac heir to the throne, Alexis, is well known and it seems difficult to deny that Rasputin did in fact possess at least some rudimentary healing and clairvoyant powers.
Yet healing apart, the imperial family was also in quest of a genuine "holy man" and authentic voice of the Russian people, who would give them God's guidance against the intrigues of the court and the hostility of politicians. Rasputin was not their first discovery in this field, but he was by far the most successful in filling the part. And some of the advice he gave them from time to time, contrary to what is often said, was sound, earthy common sense: Rasputin did not lack political instinct, and he knew the common people from whom he came. Russia at this time - and not only Russia - was going through a phase of mystical populism, exemplified by the late writings of Tolstoy. Czar Nicholas had always been a troubled, insecure, deeply pessimistic man and he was also a weak one, which meant that he was largely ruled by his wife who was strong-minded and energetic, but often obsessive, unbalanced and tending towards hysteria.
Defeat in the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 did much to weaken popular faith in the Romanovs, and the official massacre of marching workers and demonstrators which immediately followed was another heavy nail driven in the coffin of the dynasty. Nicholas lacked both the necessary ruthlessness and self-belief to rule as a successful autocrat, and the more sophisticated, devious skills required to manage a parliamentary regime. Instead he dithered ineptly between both choices, isolating himself politically and adding to Russia's internal weaknesses and divisions as she drifted towards war with Germany and Austria. The war, of course, was the last Czar's crowning disaster, opening the way for revolution and his own overthrow; but Rasputin, to do him justice, had opposed it from the first and had publicly predicted ruin for Russia if she entered it.
Rasputin's hold over the Empress was by then almost total, and when the Czar (possibly to get away from the two of them) took to spending most of his time away at Army headquarters, Alix became virtually the sole ruler of the empire, with "the Friend", as she called him, immediately behind her in the role of eminence grise. He boasted openly of his influence with her, took bribes (sometimes monetary, sometimes sexual) from petitioners and place-seekers, and in the end even nominated some of his own choices for ministerial posts. Politicians of all creeds loathed him, and so did the aristocracy - including many relatives of the imperial family - who saw him and "the German woman" as leading Russia to disaster.
Yet Rasputin also had influential supporters and followers, most of them upper-class women, who formed a kind of private sect and met regularly at his house for harangues, tea-drinking, hymn-singing and possibly sexual intimacy (the battered sofa in his small study acquired a dubious fame). For years he had not drunk alcohol, but he now returned to it and rapidly became a public and private drunkard, scandalising Russian society.
Shady businessmen and intriguers associated with him, while both his personal secretaries, who were corrupt and disloyal, gathered a fortune in bribes - he himself either squandered the rest, or gave it away to almost anybody he met. It was plain that Rasputin was already on the way downhill, and he himself often felt that his end was near, yet the Empress would still hear no criticism of him. Politicians in the Duma (Parliament) raged against him continually, while cartoonists and journalists had a field day at his expense and the Czarina's. Various cabals were formed to get rid of him, and if necessary of the Czar as well.
In the end, as most people know, the aristocracy itself got rid of Rasputin, though by that stage (December 1916) Russia was facing imminent military defeat, and food shortages were sharpening into famine. Edvard Radzinsky, who has produced a TV documentary on Rasputin's assassination and has had access to many obscure documents and sources, reconstructs the killing in a way which destroys most of the accepted myths. For instance, Rasputin did not eat poisoned cakes - he loathed sweet things - and drank only a little of the poisoned wine the conspirators had prepared for him.
Secondly, the bisexual Prince Yusupov was not his actual assassin, though he did wound him badly with a revolver. Astonishingly, the prophet recovered from this and tried to escape, but was shot in the back and then in the head by the young Grand Duke Dmitry, an expert marksman. And thirdly, there were women implicated, whom Radzinsky names - the ballerina Vera Karalli and Marianna Derfelden, the stepdaughter of another Romanov grand duke. The trap set for Rasputin had been sexually baited from the start. Even then, it seems, he probably did not die outright and when his body was found later in the Neva, his hands were raised in front of him as though he had been wrestling with the ropes which bound them.
The tale concocted by the conspirators - and for decades accepted by the world at large - apparently was intended to keep clean the hands and good name of Grand Duke Dmitry, whom they hoped to place on the imperial throne. Strangely enough, in spite of the Empress's rage and anguish, Yusupov merely suffered a mild form of internal exile, while Dmitry was sent to a dangerous area of the war front. Both lived on as aristocratic emigres for many years after the 1917 Revolution, though the monarchist politician Purishkevich, their fellow-conspirator, died in one of the many Russian epidemics of the early 1920s - as did Rasputin's widow and his pathetic, dim-minded son. The prophet's two daughters, however, survived Stalinism and the second World War. The savage fate of the imperial family at Ekaterinburg is too well known to bear repetition.
Politically, Rasputin's prophecies were soon borne out with fearful thoroughness, and Russia was indeed "drowned in blood".
Edvard Radzinsky writes as a Russian, to whom Rasputin is a strange, even scary phenomenon but not an incomprehensible one. He does not doubt, for instance, that he was genuinely "a deeply religious person," but also "a great sinner" who tried to combine "the mysterious passions of the body with the teachings of Christ". And his final summing up seems not unjust: "Rasputin is a key to understanding both the soul and the brutality of the Russia that came after him. He was a precursor of the millions of peasants who, with religious consciousness in their souls, would nevertheless tear down churches and who, with a dream of the reign of Love and Justice, would murder, rape and flood the country with blood, in the end destroying themselves."
Brian Fallon is a writer and critic.