Rasputin
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Overview
Grigory Efimovich Rasputin—drinker, thief, womanizer—arrived in St. Petersburg in 1903 as if from the medieval past . . . tattered, black-clad, muttering. By the time of his sensational murder thirteen years later, the peasant was the ”beloved Friend” of Czar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, with a seemingly supernatural power to stop the bleeding attacks of their hemophiliac son, Alexis. How could it have happened? As on society lady of the time asked, “How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow?”Drawing on confidential police reports, cabinet meeting memos, and many documents only now available, Moynahan sheds new light on Rasputin’s life and disputes some of the widely held details of his death. The Washington Post Book World called the book “balanced and well-researched” hailed its “shrewd analysis of the ways in which Rasputin’s manipulative abilities meshed with the emotional needs of isolated, superstitious members of czarist aristocracy. It is an unforgettable portrait of an age as well as of a man.
Synopsis
Brian Moynahan peels away the layers of myth to reveal the flesh-and-blood man behind Czar Nicholas II's throne.
Publishers Weekly
Lecherous, filthy and ambitious, the Siberian-born Grigory Rasputin achieved influence as a staretsa Russian Orthodox mystic and guru. Moynahan (Claws of the Bear) writes with authority about one of the century's least attractive power brokers, a man who owed his opportunities to a genetic legacy of Queen Victoria, whose daughters carried the blood disease of hemophilia into the next generation. One of the queen's German granddaughters became empress of Russia, and Alexis, the youngest child and sole male heir of Tsar Nicholas II, was a bleeder. Moynahan shows how Rasputin's hold over the empress, who dominated her husband, was a seeming power to heal, temporarily, the frail czarevich. Rasputin's influence, which he peddled everywhere, further tarnished a monarchy already riddled by incompetence and corruption. In some ways Rasputin was saintly (he urged the czar to keep out of the 1914 war, turned bribe money over to the needy and ransomed the innocent as well as the guilty out of jai); he was also treacherous and profligate. Yet he would not have thrived without the devoted Alexandra, stresses Moynahan. Though aristocratic conspirators attempted to stop Russia's wartime hemorrhaging by murdering Rasputin in December 1916, their gesture was ultimately useless, for revolution was imminent. Moynahan's version of this oft-told tale is less spellbinding than sordid. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Sept.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Lecherous, filthy and ambitious, the Siberian-born Grigory Rasputin achieved influence as a staretsa Russian Orthodox mystic and guru. Moynahan (Claws of the Bear) writes with authority about one of the century's least attractive power brokers, a man who owed his opportunities to a genetic legacy of Queen Victoria, whose daughters carried the blood disease of hemophilia into the next generation. One of the queen's German granddaughters became empress of Russia, and Alexis, the youngest child and sole male heir of Tsar Nicholas II, was a bleeder. Moynahan shows how Rasputin's hold over the empress, who dominated her husband, was a seeming power to heal, temporarily, the frail czarevich. Rasputin's influence, which he peddled everywhere, further tarnished a monarchy already riddled by incompetence and corruption. In some ways Rasputin was saintly (he urged the czar to keep out of the 1914 war, turned bribe money over to the needy and ransomed the innocent as well as the guilty out of jai); he was also treacherous and profligate. Yet he would not have thrived without the devoted Alexandra, stresses Moynahan. Though aristocratic conspirators attempted to stop Russia's wartime hemorrhaging by murdering Rasputin in December 1916, their gesture was ultimately useless, for revolution was imminent. Moynahan's version of this oft-told tale is less spellbinding than sordid. Illustrations not seen by PW. (Sept.)Library Journal
In this biography of the most notorious peasant in Russian history, Moynahan (The Russian Century, LJ 3/1/95) moves through the extraordinary and mostly familiar storythis is at least the 12th biographyof the events leading to the fall of tsardom itself. Moynahan's style is racy, with the frequent use of four-letter words, and no piece of gossip has been overlooked. He argues that the imperial couple's own personality defects, and not their son's illness, made them particularly vulnerable to exploitation: "Rasputin was an accident waiting to happen." Certainly the reader is left in no doubt that Nicholas II and his wife, she especially, were the main authors of their own and many others' misfortunes. While hardly "a precursor of the modern superstar," Rasputin remains a lurid symptom of tsarism's rot, but not the diabolical cause of its ruin. As Moynahan makes clear, he was a simple man, fallible, uneducated, intensely human, caught up in fantastic and, even now, hardly believable circumstances. This makes for good, even juicy reading; recommended for all libraries.Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, OntarioKirkus Reviews
A biography of the bizarre figure—monk, healer, advisor to the empress, and tireless lecher—who did so much to weaken the monarchy before the Russian Revolution.Moynahan, former European editor of the Sunday Times of London (The Russian Century, 1994, etc.) uses mostly secondary sources to arrive at a more persuasive judgment, though the details are scarcely less bizarre. Rasputin was born in Siberia probably around 1870, and from an early age showed unusual powers. These came to the attention of the empress, whose son, the heir apparent, was a hemophiliac.The evidence seems inescapable that on a number of occasions Rasputin was able to relieve Alexis of his pain and help him to recover when his other doctors despaired. The deep bond this created with the empress was based on her perception of his goodness, but in the wake of Russia's terrible defeats during the WW I, it gave rise to the widespread belief that the empress and Rasputin were part of a German conspiracy, and that their relationship was scandalous. It was, but not in any sexual sense. The empress used her influence over her husband ("Your poor, weak-willed little hubby," as he called himself) to promote policies and ministers that appealed to Rasputin and herself. Traffic near the front was reduced to chaos after Rasputin had a vision that only food wagons were to be allowed to pass. Ministers remained in office so short a time that they hardly bothered to move in. In all this, Rasputin's motives were more self-protective than venal, but his carousing and licentiousness aroused increasing scandal, and led to his assassination by Prince Yusupov, the heir to the greatest fortune in Russia, early in 1917.
Moynahan calls Rasputin a "curiously modern" figure, and even if the emphasis falls on the curiousness rather than the modernity, he enables the reader to understand a society that by the end gave the impression, as the French ambassador reported, of being run by lunatics.