IB European History



IB European History

Mr. Mehlbach

Massie Synopsis, Nicholas and Alexandra (1967)

Figes Synopsis, A People’s Tragedy (1996)

[pic] Григорий Ефимович Распутин (Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin)

Unlike a psychotic, a psychopath-also known as a sociopath, never breaks with reality. Psychosis is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain. When a schizophrenic has a psychotic break they completely break with the real world. A psychotic break is characterized by symptoms of auditory or visual hallucinations. A psychopath, on the other hand, never breaks with reality. They are fully aware and in control of what they are doing all of the time. A psychopath is produced in the first five years of life. These are individuals who never properly bonded with their parents, due to abandonment, neglect, physical abuse or sexual abuse. Because a psychopath is unattached they never develop an inner voice, what theologians would call conscience. A psychopath has no stop mechanism. He has no impulse control. They act on each and every impulse, regardless of outcomes. Psychopaths are all about control and domination. They are enormously charming, charismatic and highly intelligent. They are sexually insatiable and they are sex addicts. Psychopaths are highly manipulative and pathological liars. Psychopaths have a freakishly high pain threshold, they are fearless and psychopaths are great risk takers. Psychopaths can not form any lasting friendships. They view other human beings as objects, like pieces of furniture. Because of their extreme psychological makeup, they tend to be extremely successful in the realms of warfare (examples: Alexander the Great and Napoléon), politics (examples: Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler and Bill Clinton) and business (example: Bernie Madoff.) Psychopaths are the most famous serial killers of history. Because a psychopath is created the first five years of life and because a psychopath has no conscience, there is no cure. While most psychopaths are not serial killers, all psychopaths kill peoples’ souls.

Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a psychopath. In Russian, Rasputin means “perverted.” When he first appeared in St. Petersburg in 1905, he was in his early thirties. He had long greasy hair, huge broad-shoulders, he was extremely muscular and he had enormous physical strength. It was rumored that as a child, Rasputin could lift a baby calf off the ground with a single arm. Rasputin was absolutely repulsive. He never bathed. When he walked into a room the stench was unbearable. He rose and slept in the same clothes, day after day without ever bothering to wash himself or change his clothes. Food from previous meals was lodged in his beard. He ate without bothering to use eating utensils. His teeth were rotten and covered in a yellowish film and his breath was rancid. Rasputin’s eyes were his most remarkable feature. Friends and enemies alike found Rasputin’s eyes irresistible-steely grey, light and brilliant. Rasputin’s gaze was at once hypnotic, piercing and caressing, naïve and cunning, far-off and intent. In conversation with people, Rasputin’s eyes seemed to radiate magnetism. With glimmering eyes and a deep baritone voice, Rasputin would hold an audience in rapt and stunned silence. Most people found the man absolutely fascinating. Women found him sexually magnetic.

Rasputin was a rake with an insatiable sexual appetite. The women of St. Petersburg found him irresistible. He radiated unbelievable sexual energy and eroticism. Rasputin was rumored to have had an enormous sexual organ. His blonde peasant wife knew about his womanizing and said, “He has enough for all of us.” His nickname in St. Petersburg was, “the horse.” He was bisexual and found men just as pleasurable as women. Upon Stolypin’s orders in 1906 and then again in 1911, the Okhrana documented hundreds of affairs. Rumors of his reputation for sexual perversion and of his endless sexual appetites spread through St. Petersburg like wildfire. Rasputin attempted to seduce any girl he met. His method was direct. He’d grab and grope the woman and start to undo buttons. Naturally he was frequently kicked and scratched and bitten, but the sheer volume of his efforts brought him notable success. He learned that even in the shyest and primmest of girls, the emptiness and loneliness of life in St. Petersburg or in Siberia or on a mir, bred a flickering of sexual appetite and romance. As a young man Rasputin had been a member of the Khlysty, a religious sect that believed that God could only be reached through sexual orgasm with multiple partners. Besides sex, Rasputin was addicted to bottle after bottle of vodka. He drank from morning to night, adding to the horribly unpleasant smell of his breath.

Rasputin appeared in St. Petersburg in 1905 as a starets-a Man of God who lived in poverty, asceticism and solitude, offering himself as a guide to other souls in moments of suffering and turmoil. Sometimes, as in Rasputin’s case, the starets might also be a strannik-a holy pilgrim who carried his poverty and his offerings of guidance in wanderings from place to place. It was as a starets that Rasputin was first introduced to the Empress on that fateful day in November 1905 and it was in this starets that Alexandra put all her faith to save her son. For Rasputin, the Empress and her children were sexually off limits. Though St. Petersburg after 1911 was flooded with pornography portraying lewd pictures of Rasputin and the royal family, this was the public perception, not the physical reality. Rasputin’s manner with Nicholas and Alexandra was perfect for the role he created for himself. He referred to the sovereigns not as “Your Majesty” or “Your Imperial Majesty,” but as Batiushka and Matiushka, the ‘Father’ and the ‘Mother’ of all Russian peasants. The Romanov children adored Rasputin. They loved his stories of wolves and snow, and his deep booming voice, and his love for peasant songs and funny jokes. For this reason, Alexandra fully trusted Rasputin with her children and found nothing at all wrong with allowing Rasputin to tuck the children in at night. Because of Rasputin’s intimate relationship with the royal family, Russia was convinced of sexual relations and impropriety.

Because of Rasputin’s ability to calm the Czarevich and consequently control his attacks of hemophiliac bleeding, Alexandra became more and more convinced that Rasputin was essential for the health of her family. Herein lays the tragedy of the Romanovs. Imperial Russia was never told of the illness of Alexis. Russia only saw a demented peasant living among the royal family. Consequently, Imperial Russia could never understand Alexandra’s obsession with this peasant monk. Over time, Alexandra became convinced, especially after 1912, that Rasputin was a personal emissary from God to her, to her husband and to Imperial Russia. Rasputin had all the trappings: he was a starets: he was a peasant; he was fully devoted to the autocracy: Rasputin was fully committed to keeping the Czarevich alive: and, most importantly, Rasputin worshiped the holy Russian triumvirate: Czar-Church-People. When Rasputin first came to St. Petersburg in 1905, he had no plan for making himself the power behind the Russian throne. Like many successful opportunist, Rasputin lived from day to day, manipulating those around him who were incapable of resisting his power. In this case, Rasputin’s path led to the upper reaches of Russian society, and from there, because of Alexis’s illness, to the throne.

As Rasputin’s influence over Alexandra grew so did the legends about his sexual powers. There were lurid stories of rape, drunken orgies, and days spent in bath-houses with prostitutes. Rasputin was the talk of St. Petersburg as the stories of his sexual conquests multiplied. Rasputin told the boyar wives he seduced that sex with him was the road to salvation. Some women got a curious sexual excitement from being humiliated by Rasputin. Many reported that the first time they made love to Rasputin that the orgasms were so intense that they saw God and then fainted. Perhaps his potency as a lover also has a physical explanation. Felix Yusupov, Rasputin’s gay lover, claimed Rasputin’s penis was enormous and had a large wart strategically situated on the head that drove women into a frenzy. On the other hand, there is evidence to suggest that Rasputin was impotent and the pleasure he received form having sex with women was due to the psychological domination. After Rasputin was stabbed in a failed assassination attempt in 1914, the Okhrana doctor found his penis to be so small and shriveled that the doctor wondered whether Rasputin was capable of the sexual act at all. Rasputin once boasted to the monk Iliodor that he could lie with hundreds of beautiful and naked women without feeling any passion because his, “penis did not function properly.” What made all this talk so politically damaging to the Romanovs was the widespread belief in Russia that Rasputin was Alexandra’s lover. There were even rumors that Rasputin and Alexandra were engaged in wild orgies with Nicholas and Anna Vyrubova, Alexandra’s lady-in-waiting. There was no evidence of any of these rumors. Nevertheless, Rasputin was a public relations disaster for the royal family.

Alexandra was truly a tragic figure. Intensely private, pathologically shy, socially retarded and fanatically protective, Alexandra could never appreciate the depth of Russia’s hatred for her and for her son’s savior. No parent should ever have to bury a child. There is no word in any language that describes this horror. In any culture and in any language, the death of a child is beyond comprehension. It is in this context that the depth of Alexandra’s despair must be appreciated. And it is in this context that the manipulative power of Rasputin must be recognized. A psychopath is a predator. They immediately read human weakness and then use this weakness to their own advantage. Rasputin was both compelling and irresistible to Alexandra. Along with his burning eyes, he had a fluent tongue. His head was filled with Scriptures and his deep powerful voice made him a compelling preacher. There is no doubt that Rasputin could control the bleeding of the young Czarevich. The common belief is that Rasputin used his extraordinary eyes to hypnotize Alexis and with the boy in a hypnotic state, suggested that the bleeding would stop. There is a direct one-to-one relationship between stress and hemorrhaging. With his eyes and with his soothing stories of animals on the Russian steppe, Rasputin would calm the Czarevich and consequently allow for a blood clot to form. Anger, anxiety, resentment and embarrassment increase the blood flow. The calm and sense of well-being produced by this powerful flow of reassuring language produced a dramatic change in the health of Alexis. Rasputin took the Empire by controlling the bleeding of the Czarevich. Without Stolypin to block his growing influence after 1911, Rasputin’s ambitions knew no bounds. It is this point that leads to the most fascinating counterfactual in Russian history: What if, on 18 September 1911, Rasputin had been murdered and Stolypin had survived?

Stephen Beletsky, director of the St. Petersburg Police Department, later reckoned that Rasputin’s power was firmly established by 1913. It took Rasputin five years, 1906-1911, to gain power and then he exercised it for another five, 1911-1916. In both estimates, the turning point falls in the neighborhood of 1912, the year Alexis almost died at Spala. It was the Spala Incident of 1912 that cemented Rasputin in the heart of Alexandra and consequently behind the throne of Nicholas. Beginning with the Khodynka Meadow Disaster of 27 May 1896, and continuing with Bloody Sunday 9 January 1906, the government of Nicholas II was a public relations disaster. He seemed to embody an incompetent government, as evidenced by the catastrophic defeat of Russia at Tshushima on 27 May 1905. Rasputin would forever tarnish the image of Czar. The Romanov public image would steadily decline. By 1916, much of Russia was convinced that Rasputin and not Nicholas was running the country. With close to three million military casualties in just two years of fighting 1914-1916, the only way the average Russian could explain away Russian defeat was by scape goating Alexandra: the Empress was a German spy: the Empress was Rasputin’s whore: the Empress was sexually depraved, bedding her children with a crude and filthy peasant.

Two factors more than any other explain the decline of the Romanovs. Imperial Russia was toppled by a tiny defect in the body of a little boy. Hidden from public view, veiled in rumor, working from within, this unseen tragedy would change the history of Russia and the world. Compounded with the tragedy of Alexis was the arrival in 1905 of a sociopath of enormous personal magnetism. It was the collision of these two circumstances that doomed the Romanovs to a fate of oblivion. Unfortunately, the decline of the Romanovs mirrored the collapse of the entire country. By 1916, the government of Nicholas II was simply overwhelmed: massive debt, horrendous military casualties, the coldest winter on record, worker strikes, and then, if that wasn’t enough, Rasputin and the illness of the Czarevich. By 1917 Imperial Russia was trapped in the vortex of a hurricane of events it could no longer control. This is why Lenin explained his success by suggesting, “The country dropped into my lap like a piece of rotten fruit.”

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