Who murdered Rasputin? Life, sex and miracles of the "holy evil"

DOMENICO VECCHIONI

Who murdered Rasputin ?

Life, Sex and miracles of the « holy evil »

Translated by Rashid Hussain

Chapter I

The context

1905 turns out to be a particularly bad year for the Tsarists regime. It is in fact the year of the prodromes of the great Bolshevik Revolution, the year of powerful social turmoil the consequences of which, however, are completely overlooked by Russian leaders. On January 22, a workers' demonstration, peaceful and aimed only at letting Tsar Nicholas II know the appalling situation of the dispossessed of all categories, is brutally repressed by the commander of the St. Petersburg Square, Grand Duke Vladimir Alexandrovich, one of the brothers of Alexander III . It is the terrible bloody Sunday. An open wound in the social body of Russia that will no longer heal, a totally unjustified massacre, an event that marks the end of the paternalistic relationship existing between deep Russia and her tsar, between the petite people and her little father. More than a thousand demonstrators are killed, or rather massacred, demanding better living and working conditions. Agriculture has long known a serious crisis. Peasants (85% of the population), despite the abolition of serfdom, have seen their situation deteriorate further. They then abandoned the countryside, reached the cities, turned into workers and went to swell the ranks of the wretched proletarians of the country's just sketched out industrialization that feeds on foreign capital in search of high yields and very low local labor costs . The new workers are exhausted and require, totally unheeded, decent wages, minimum union rights and an acceptable standard of living. The country is changing and the situation would require a courageous and unprecedented relationship between power and society, a progressive adaptation of the government system to the new needs of the population. But Tsar Nicholas II, who concentrates all the power in his hands, does not seem to be in tune with his time, guardian of a centuries-old tradition of autocracy that he wants to keep intact for future generations. The anarchists, in turn, are not slow to take revenge and intensify their bloody attacks.

In Moscow, a few days after the blood Sunday of St. Petersburg, a nitroglycerin bomb literally disintegrates the Grand Duke Sergio, the Tsar's brother-in-law, who passed by his carriage, without an escort, not far from the family residence. His wife, Elizabeth of Hesse-Darmstadt (Tsar Alexandra's older sister), shaken by the sound of the explosion, immediately senses that the victim is the husband, governor of Moscow, repeatedly threatened previously by anarchists. She then rushes upset on the street and as she approaches the epicenter of the explosion, she finds confirmation of her dark premonitions, meeting pieces and tatters of her husband's body. A hand, a foot, an ear ... in short, a horrible puzzle that, with amazing self-control, somehow manages to recompose. A tough psychological test that will mark her forever and force her to withdraw from the world in an isolated convent. An attack of particular cruelty and emblematic of the latent, unsustainable and dramatic social situation that Nicholas II continues not to see and not understand, convinced that everything can be resolved with greater repression. The internal political situation is therefore complicated, aggravated, exacerbated, in the face of a government that appears uncertain, incapable and running out of ideas. The autocratic regime begins to creak from many sides. The liberal currents are in favor of a modernization of the monarchical system, but they would need the support of the tsar who, on the other hand, confirms himself to be short-sighted and reluctant to any reform that could affect his power. Socialist movements, for their part, end up splitting into two main groups. The Bolsheviks, proponents of the regenerative revolution aimed at bringing down the regime and the Mensheviks, who were also in favour of the end of the monarchy, but with less violent methods and with the help of the liberal currents themselves and then thinks he can compensate for the internal failures with decisive foreign policy initiatives to reaffirm the power of the empire in the East and the prestige of the Romanovs in the West.

Contrary to his predictions, on May 27 and 28, the outdated and poorly organized Russian fleet was completely destroyed by Admiral Togo's powerful Japanese naval team in the famous battle of Tsushima. The mutiny of the battleship Potemkin, a symbolic prologue of the revolutionary wave that will set fire to the country a few years later and will blow away, like a leaf the wind, the Russian ancient regime, breaks out in Odessa.

The military defeat was followed by a diplomatic disaster: with the Treaty of Portsmouth, Russia ceded the city of Port Arthur to Japan with all its appurtenances, the southern half of the island of Sakhalin and special fishing rights along the coast of Siberia. The Tsarists government is also forced to withdraw all Russian troops from Manchuria and to accept Tokyo's protectorate over Korea.

Disorders within, defeats abroad. The tsar cannot continue to remain closed in his autocratic conception of power and deaf to the growing demands for democratic openness in favor of his people. So on October 17th he decides to sign, reluctantly for the truth and with several mental reservations, the document granting the Russians civil liberties (press, assembly and association), outlines the functioning of an assembly elected on a census basis and with limited legislative powers (the Duma) and establishes the creation of the Council of Ministers, at the head of which is placed the reformer Count Sergei Witte, former owner of the finance ministry from 1892 to 1903. But the ministers will continue to be appointed by the tsar and will be responsible for him. In fact, Nicholas II will never agree to share his power with the Duma. Therefore imperial Russia, despite the new external framework of constitutional monarchy, remains in essence an autocratic regime where all powers are concentrated in the hands of one man, whose legitimacy in government derives directly from God.

1905 is also the year that sees the tsarina make the acquaintance of Ania Tanieva, daughter of a high court official. Invited to follow the sovereigns on their usual summer cruise in the Gulf of Finland on board the imperial yacht, the young Ania immediately conquers Alexandra's sympathy and trust, becoming her inseparable friend of the heart. A friendship that will have unfortunate repercussions on court life and on the history of the country.

A year therefore full of events and full of emotions and premonitions. But it's not over. Among the significant events of 1905 there is also an annotation, at first glance anodyne, made by the tsar in his intimate diary: today, November 1, I met a man of God called Gregory, from the Tobolsk province . It is the beginning of a fatal bond, the birth of a friendship with unpredictable consequences, the start of a story that one never tires of telling.

Gregory is Rasputin, a man who, for better or for worse, will exert an increasing influence on the decisions of the tsar and the tsarina and therefore on the development of the political events of the country in the dramatic decade preceding the Bolshevik revolution. A man who will constitute an enigma, for many still not definitively dissolved: evil demon, who contributes significantly to the fall of the country and the Romanov dynasty or unheard prophet whose advice, if followed, could instead have avoided the country mourning and devastation? Healer with effective paranormal powers or just a skilled hypnotist that weak minds can't resist? Man of God or great sinner? Even his death remains a mystery today: who murdered him, Prince Jussupov as has always been believed or, according to more recent interpretations, Oswald Rayner, an agent of the British secret services obsessed with the idea that the mad monk pushes in 1916 the tsar towards a separate peace with Germany, an event that would have been fatal for London and for the results of the Great War? A man whose actions must in any case be condemned without appeal or a person whose activity must be reassessed, at least in part, as some historiographical currents of today's Russia claim?

Chapter II

«Our friend »

Gregory Efimovitch Rasputin was born in 1869 in Pokrovskoe, a remote Siberian village in the Tobolsk district, not far from the city of Tiumen, more than three thousand kilometers east of St. Petersburg, the then capital of the empire. Rasputin in Russian means debauched. It is therefore probably a nickname - from which the person concerned has no longer managed to free himself - given to him after his youthful feats made of alcohol, sex and violence. However, it cannot be excluded that it is his real family name, as many historians attest, given that Rasputin also means crossroads and that in the region there were other families with the same surname. It is not known for sure. The fact is that Tsarina Alexandra will never refer, modestly, to the Siberian peasant with the nickname Rasputin, nor will she appreciate the others doing it, always calling him Father Gregory or, speaking of him in the third person, our friend . Indeed in 1908, to avoid any misunderstanding, he prompted him to change his surname to Novyky: from now on Gregory will sign his correspondence with the name Novy (new). Rasputin's name will essentially be used rather by his disparagers, while admirers will prefer Staretz (enlightened, man inspired by God) or Father Grigory (although Rasputin will never be part of the Orthodox hierarchy nor will he receive any ecclesiastical title, not even that of monk, although going down in history as the mad monk).

Gregory's parents are relatively wealthy farmers. The father, Efim, owner of a few acres of land, rounds up the end of the month as a coachman for the village. As commonly happens among peasant families who need their children's workforce, little education is provided for Grigory and his older brother Mischa who, barely able to read and write, will have to help the family in the hard work of the fields and in keeping animals. The two brothers grow up in freedom, between forests with which they learn to discover the mysteries, between the ancient local traditions with which they are deeply imbued and between a population very devoted to the Orthodox faith from which they are deeply influenced.

The facts relating to Rasputin's childhood and adolescence for the most part are wrapped in the mists of the myth that often offers different versions of the same event, depending on the needs and purposes of the biographer. We will therefore try to refer only to the essential, plausible, generally accepted episodes. It is certain that since childhood Rasputin shows a special sensitivity for religious issues, mystical illuminations, warm and intimate environments of prayer. Always listen with rapture to the stories and enchantments narrated by pilgrims-travelers hosted by their parents. A typical figure of deep, orthodox and mystical Russia, the Staretz (chosen by God, man of the Lord) uses wandering in the country living solely on the hospitality of the peasants who, amazed and full of respect, listen to his words where they overlap references to the distant monasteries visited, to the miracles he witnessed, to the illuminations from which he was struck, to the divine teachings. Gregory is totally fascinated by these bearded pilgrims who have abandoned everything, feed on the word of Christ, know how to show each man the way to his own salvation and survive only thanks to the generosity of his neighbor, perhaps sometimes returning the courtesy with thaumaturgical and salvific interventions . Little Rasputin thus prepares his own

young heart to receive the mystical-religious precepts of the Siberian peasants and the poor and illuminated church. Perhaps since then he thinks that his true vocation is to travel the streets of Holy Russia by propagating the word of Christ, giving comfort to the sick and preaching the purification of the spirit.

One day he has in his hands a book that tells the birth of Jesus. He reads it avidly, quickly learns it by heart and then asks the father to be able to know other texts on the life of Christ. He is soon satisfied and, from that moment, no one in the village will know Jesus' life better than little Gregory. However, this does not prevent him from joining the most rowdy boys in the village for raids of various kinds, reckless actions, clashes sometimes characterized also by a certain physical violence. In short, Gregory has behaved since he was a boy where they mix a few years later, in a mysterious cocktail of feelings, mysticism and unruliness, physical brutality and kindness, predisposition to sin and tendency to ecstasy, physical degradation and purification of the spirit.

At twelve Gregory suffers a psychic trauma that will have incalculable and unfathomable consequences on the development of his personality. During one of the many raids with his brother Mischa, he falls due to a banal accident in the icy waters of the Tura river, on whose left bank the few houses of Prokovskoe develop. The future Rasputin does not hesitate for a moment, he dives to Mischa's rescue. The two reeled desperately pushed by the current, seem to be passed off, wiggling with force and in the end they manage to escape happily. But they got cold, very cold. Both fall ill with severe pneumonia. There are no doctors in the area and only a midwife will give them some slight, unfortunately not decisive comfort. Thus the disease runs its course. So nothing seems to be able to stop the high fever and the delusional phases for both. Mischa can't resist and dies a few days after the accident, Gregory instead, albeit with great difficulty, manages to get away. He will remain days between life and death, almost without regaining consciousness, prey to mysterious and repeated delusions. Upon awakening he learned of the disappearance of his brother to whom he was very attached. Emotional shock is strong and violent. And it is precisely following the death of his brother that Gregory - according to his countrymen - begins to prove that he possesses a second sight, as if an unknown force present in his being had awakened. In fact, he tells his parents that a shining lady, dressed in white and blue, appeared to him in sleep assuring him that he