Alex De Jonge

An interesting but flawed book about an interesting but flawed guy. You can make a case, I suppose, that Rasputin is the most important person of the 20th century. No Rasputin, no collapse of Russia, no Communism, no Stalin, no Hitler, no Mao, etc. We can thank Grigorii Efimovich that we live in interesting times. (Well, I imagine the times would have still been interesting without him. Different, though.)


Rasputin was a Siberian peasant who became a starets, a sort of wandering “holy” man. Although he apparently spent a short time in a monastery, he was never a monk and his brief attempt to take holy orders latter in life ran afoul of his functional illiteracy. There were loads of people like Rasputin wandering around Russia; what made Rasputin different was his ability to fascinate women. None of the men who met him (with a couple of minor and temporary exceptions) ever saw him as anything but a charlatan - a sometimes useful charlatan because of his political connections, but still a fraud. Women, on the other hand, even educated women who should have known better, usually fell for him lock, stock and corset; the most notable being the tsarina Alexandra. There was a religious cult in Russia called the khlsty, who believed that forgiveness was the most important divine attribute, but in order to be forgiven you had to sin. The sin generally selected was not avarice, anger, envy, gluttony, pride or sloth, either. Rasputin, although not formally a khlsty, was amazingly adept at convincing women to have something to be forgiven for - everybody from society ladies to peasant girls. He also liked to take a drink now and then - he was generally incoherent by noon. (Although, oddly for a Russian, he preferred wine to vodka.)


That being said, otherwise he wasn’t that bad a guy. He seems to have believed in his own powers of faith healing - as far as he was concerned, he wasn’t a fraud. Although he cheerfully accepted every bribe offered him, he equally cheerfully gave the money away (after deductions for wine and brothels). He had simple tastes, remaining with peasant clothes and food. He was very good with children and animals - this apparently contributed to his faith-healing success with the tsarevich. He was one of the very few Russian religious figures of the time who was not an antiSemite (in fact, this prompted his enemies to claim he was in the pay of the proverbial Elders of Zion). And he was tough; his assassins fed him a plate of cakes and a bottle of wine, both laden with potassium cyanide, shot him twice, stabbed him, smashed his face in with a club, and tied him up and threw him off a bridge into the river - but the autopsy discovered he was still alive at that point and died of drowning.


Although Rasputin in the central character, the book fulfils its promise of being about his life and times. There’s plenty of background about the other tragically colorful people inhabiting preWWI and wartime Russia. One interesting facet is the author takes Rasputin’s psychic abilities at face value; i.e., Alex de Jonge believes Rasputin really was a clairvoyant and faith healer. The usual evidence is offered - various “miracle” cures of the hemophiliac tsarevich and “predictions” of miscellaneous ambiguous events. (The author glosses over the problem of why the clairvoyant Rasputin couldn’t predict his own assassination). My initial take was to dismiss the whole book as BS as soon it became obvious the author was a Believer, but on second thought it seems to have contributed some insights that a skeptic might not have had. After all, the whole point of Rasputin was that many of his contemporaries believed in his powers and it perhaps helps to understand them if you are equally credulous. Seen this way, Rasputin’s story comes across as tragedy when it could have been farce.



Nevertheless, I want to track down some more Rasputin biographies to check. I’ll give this one four stars for interest and writing style.… (more)

Grigorii Rasputin was a real enigma. Was he a true holy man? Was he a mere charlatan? Was he the “mad monk?” Was he a con man? Did he indeed have supernatural powers? Was he merely a sex fiend who used his position to take advantage of women throughout imperial Russia?

This biography attempts to answer these questions and more. Unfortunately, it bogs down somewhere in the middle and gets repetitive and somewhat dull, so it’s relatively hard to slog all the way through, honestly, but it’s an honest look at an infamous character from history who I always wanted to learn about, so that’s a good thing.

Rasputin was born a poor peasant in Siberia, where he always gravitated back to, and gravitated toward the spiritual, like so many of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Russians. Some were Orthodox. Many were sects that had split off and were frankly doing their own thing, some quite odd. Many seemed quite insane. Most had ardent disciples as that period of Russia had a great deal of people undergoing spiritual searches and there were many people going on pilgrimages throughout the country and there were many monasteries where people would stop for spiritual retreats. Rasputin, though married with children, engaged in this behavior, and went on years-long pilgrimages, traveling throughout the country, as well as to the Holy Land, and he came to be viewed as a holy man who prayed frequently and who had supernatural powers, including the power of healing and the power of prescience. The author does not make too many attempts to confirm or deny these powers, but does acknowledge that apparently there were many witnesses to confirm his abilities in these areas, so it’s difficult to deny them.

Rasputin made his way to the capital with the help of influential friends he made over time, people who became benefactors and disciples, most of whom were women. He had power over women which was to manifest itself through his entire life. He had powerful, hypnotic eyes with which he could force people – women – to do whatever he wanted them to do, typically engage in sexual acts with him. He was a sex maniac. He would have parties at his place, dinner parties, although he didn’t eat meat, or wine parties, and would take women back to his bedroom one at a time and have sex with them although everyone could hear him/them and everyone would talk about what a great man he was, about how spiritual he was, about what a great healer he was, about how wise he was, about how he should be sainted by the church (???), all the while, while he was persuading women both single and married to have sex of all types with him whether they wanted to or not, and if they did not, he would often simply rape them. Sometimes he would tell them they had to sin in order to be forgiven by God. He could excuse everything using God; he was mentally quick.

He somehow came to the attention of the tsar and tsarina through very complicated and complex ways and met them finally, he a simple peasant “holy man” who refused to change his ways for anyone, royal or not. He ate with his fingers, for God’s sake, and felt his beard eliminated the need for a napkin. He spoke with the Romanavs and they came away impressed. They had several children, the youngest one, a small boy, was quite ill with a disease that made his leg bleed to the point where it could kill him if not treated quickly and even then, it only stopped the bleeding, it didn’t cure it. The tsarina was beside herself.

She had heard of Rasputin’s alleged healing powers and asked him about it. Her son was suffering. Rasputin laid his hand on the boy, prayed, told her the boy would be fine, and he got better overnight. That did it. Rasputin was part of the inner circle. And that automatically pissed off the aristocrats of the city and country.

The royal family started having Rasputin over on a semi-regular basis, when he wasn’t traveling back to Siberia, and the chief of the secret police put a dossier together of his dalliances and presented it to Tsar Nicholas, only to be rebuffed. The tsar wasn’t thrilled with Rasputin’s behavior, but he wasn’t about to risk his wife’s wrath by doing anything with her favorite person and his son’s savior, so he buried the information and did nothing. This happened several times. Meanwhile, Rasputin both continued to gain disciples as his fame grew, especially as he came to be known as the peasant who had made it in court, and his original religious backers started to back away from him, horrified of his sins of the flesh, which he barely hid, if at all.

Something else happened a little later that cemented his position even more. The tsar and his family traveled to Germany while Rasputin was in Siberia. Their son became seriously ill and they attempted to travel back to Russia for medical aid, but couldn’t make it home. They were forced to stop prematurely and it appeared their son would die. He was given last rites and out of desperation, the tsarina called Rasputin in Siberia and pleaded with him to heal her son. He asked for a couple of hours and said he’d call her back. He prayed diligently, by all accounts, called her back and told her that her son would be healed and live and hung up. Her son recovered, lived, was healed, they returned home, and from that point on, Rasputin could never again do any wrong in her eyes, nor even in the eyes of the tsar, no matter how much “evidence” of wrong doing was laid in front of his eyes by jealous competitors, security personnel, and religious personalities.

All of this is interesting to a certain degree, but at the same time, there’s a certain degree of redundancy in the book leading up to this point. The author goes on and on about the women, the parties, the travels, the sects, Siberia, the Russian political system, etc. Frankly, it got a little boring. I made it to page 214 out of 341 pages before deciding I had gotten a good enough picture of Rasputin. After all, he never was given an actual title. He had by this time gotten nearly as much power as he would ever have. I know he would be assassinated and by whom. What would the final 125 pages have to say that would keep me riveted? I had had a hard enough time getting to page 214, reading five other books, some longer, while reading these 200+ pages, simply due to boredom. Maybe if another author had tackled the subject, it would have been more interesting, I don’t know. Or perhaps Rasputin isn’t, after all, all that interesting of a historical personage. I don’t know. I’m a little disappointed. I’m not sure what to think. He was interesting, certainly. But I feel like he was lucky, a pervert, a fraud, a possessor of potential minor supernatural powers that he made occasional use of, and in the end, someone who helped bring about the downfall of the empire through his excesses, which is really bizarre when you think about it. After how he started out, how could this happen?

This isn’t a bad book, nor is it necessarily poorly written. It just didn’t really connect with me and it’s not overly scintillating. Somewhat interesting subject matter. Another biography might be better, I don’t know. I’m not sure if I’d recommend this book over another biography of the same person. Three stars max. Simply for the extensive research. Otherwise, it’s a two star book.… (more)