The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky Read Free Book Online

in the Siberian expanse on the banks of the Tura river near a large highway.
    Following that highway for many hundreds of versts, coachmen would drive their horses along the banks of the Tura from the Ural mountain townof Verkhoturye, with its Nikolaev Monastery (which Grigory would later become so fond of), through Tyumen, and then on to Tobolsk.
    It was along that same highway through Pokrovskoe past Rasputin’s house that the royal family would travel to their deaths in Ekaterinburg in the terrible year of 1918.
    The birth date of our hero has been a riddle. Even his recent biographers have offered the most diverse dates for his birth, from the 1860s to the 1870s. Soviet encyclopedias give the date 1864–5.
    Surviving to this day in Rasputin’s native village of Pokrovskoe are the ruins of the Church of the Mother of God, in which he was baptized. And preserved in the Tobolsk archives for the church are a few ‘registers’, or books in which births, marriages, and deaths were recorded.
    In one is an entry for the marriage on 21 January 1862, of the peasant Efim Yakovlevich Rasputin, aged twenty, and the peasant maiden Anna Vasilievna, aged twenty-two.
    Anna promptly bore Efim daughters, but they all died as infants. Finally, on 7 August 1867, she gave birth to a boy, Andrei. The boy perished in childhood, too. As with Hitler and Stalin, all the preceding children died. As if God were cautioning about childbearing in that family.
    And then 1869. Before 1869 there is no record of Grigory’s birth in any of the registers. So he could not have been born before 1869, and the dates in the encyclopedias are wrong. The registers for 1869 and later have disappeared from the archive.
    Nevertheless, it has been possible to establish an exact date. A census of the residents of the village of Pokrovskoe was found in the Tyumen archive, and appearing next to the name Grigory Rasputin in the column for the ‘year, month, and day of birth according to the register’ is the date 10 January 1869, which puts an end to all surmise. It is the day of Saint Grigory, for whom he was named.
    Rasputin’s own efforts are responsible for the confusion about his birth date. In the 1907 ‘File of the Tobolsk Consistory’, he states that he is forty-two. That is, he adds four years. Seven years later, in 1914 during the investigation of the attempt on his life by Khionia Guseva, he declares, ‘My name is Grigory Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, fifty years old.’ That is, he adds five years. In the 1911 notebook in which the last tsarina wrote down his sayings, he says of himself, ‘I have lived fifty years and am beginning my sixth decade.’ That is, he has added eight years!
    It is really not very hard to understand that stubborn adding on of years. The tsarina called him ‘elder’. The category of elder is a special institutionin Russian ecclesiastical life. In the past, monks had been called elders, but usually only if they were anchorites. In the nineteenth century, however, the term was used for those monks who had been marked by a special sign. Monks who through fasting, prayer, and a life pleasing to God deserved to be chosen by Him. God had given them the power to prophesy and to heal. They were spiritual guides and intercessors before God. But at the same time, elders in the popular mind were also people of great age who had experienced much and who because of their age had repudiated everything earthly. In the lexicon of Russian, the word ‘elder’ also means ‘a very old man.’
    Thus Rasputin, whom the tsarina called ‘elder’, was embarrassed by his by no means advanced age. He was in fact younger than the tsar. And so he exaggerated his age, which was an easy thing to do thanks to his wrinkled, prematurely aged peasant face.
    The Shameful Name
    Rasputin’s last name comes from the shameful word rasputa . The touching attempts of Western investigators and Rasputin’s Russian admirers to derive his name from rasputitsa (the