The epoch was difficult to date. The victim’s place of birth—a village of rough wooden cabins set in forests and marshes on a Siberian riverbank—was known. His age was uncertain. Rasputin was illiterate until he was well into his teens. The notes he scrawled in his prime—biblical sayings, jerky and half-formed thoughts for women admirers, requests for favors—were unpunctuated and hard to read. He kept no diary. His life was full of gaps, impulses, and wanderings. He was pious and lustful, crystal and mud; his great sleight of mind enabled him to conceal the sinner from those he wished to see only the saint. The censor saw to it that little was written about him while he was alive. Much of what came later was more concerned with exploiting his mystique than with establishing facts. If he knew his date of birth, and most Russian peasants did not, he made no effort to record it. It did not concern him; he was not an astrologer.
It came to be of interest only after his death. His daughter Maria, with legend most likely in mind, claimed that a fiery meteor burst across the night sky as Anna Egorovna, wife of Efim Aklovlevich Rasputin, a carter and farmer, gave birth to her second son. Maria gave her father’s birth weight as seven pounds and the date as January 23, 1871. That date corresponds to January 10 in the Julian calendar used in prerevolutionary Russia. The same day appears in the register of baptisms in Tyumen, the nearest city to his birthplace, with the year as 1869. If this is correct—it is the most likely—then he was three weeks short of his forty-eighth birthday when the black automobile collected him for his last ride.
Reporters covering the murder at the time put Rasputin’s age at fifty. Six months later the new provisional government set up an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry to examine Rasputin and the decay of the autocracy. Evidence from witnesses who had known Rasputin in Siberia and elsewhere was collected by its chief investigator, F. P. Stimson, a respected lawyer from Kharkov. Stimson wasted few words on his subject’s origins, and he used different dates.
“Grigory Efimovich Rasputin was born in the sloboda Pokrovskoye of Tyumen district, Tobolsk province, in 1864 or 1865,” he recorded. “His parents were healthy, nobody insane among his kin, and they lived the way average peasants live.” It was understandable that he added four or five years to Rasputin’s age. His subject had raddled himself with drink and women in his final months.
Grischa, as he was called, began life as a sturdy infant. He stood at six months and toddled at eight. It was as well, for rural Siberia was primitive and no place for the weak. He had a one in five chance of dying before he reached his teens, of diphtheria, cholera, influenza. The nearest doctor was in Tyumen, seventy miles away by river or by Trakt 4, the rough road linking Tyumen and the provincial capital in Tobolsk. Years later, with a deep stomach wound from the first attempt to murder him, his oxlike constitution alone pulled him through the journey. Medicine in Pokrovskoye was no more than vodka for antiseptic, herbal teas for fevers, and slabs of raw meat to draw the infection from wounds.
The village was on a bank high above the Tura River. A landing stage of wooden poles and planks stuck out beyond the reeds for riverboats to Tyumen and Tobolsk, 120 miles to the north. Twice a month yellow and black prison barges with cages of iron mesh passed the village on their way to Tobolsk, a reminder of Siberia’s use as a dumping ground for convicts and exiles. Cleared pasture, water meadows, and fields of black earth stretched back from the bank for two miles before running into marshes and forests of poplar, aspen, larch, and birch. The unpaved main street was a mile-long river of dirt without sidewalks or shade trees. Pigs routed along it. It was lined on both sides by cabins built of double planks against the cold, painted green and red, and caulked with oakum, behind stout limed fences. The roofs were shingled with bark. In spring and autumn the farm carts mired to their axles in mud. In summer they dragged clouds of dust and midges behind them. Crude sleds, frames of wooden poles lashed together with rope, were used in winter.
The only building of note was a stone and wooden church with a gilt onion dome. The kabachok, the village tavern, served rough Siberian vodka and beer; Rasputin’s addiction to sweet wines came after he left the village and began to visit monasteries where wine and Madeira were drunk. A general store sold salted fish, farm tools, plows and harrows, lamps and oil. Horses were hitched to posts outside it. The barns and cattle sheds were in the village, and the countryside was empty.
Its monotony reminded Western travelers of “the sadness of the sea,” a waste across which dirt tracks wound like the wakes of ships. The earth was monochrome until, like sails looming out of a sea haze, a church pierced the gloom in whirls of color. Beside it the village was “like a hem of rubbish thrown about.” Though native Siberians like Rasputin were lyrical about their land, even the most high-spirited of men from European Russia fell prey to melancholy there. “In the summer our lives were made wretched by midges,” the revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote of his exile. “They even bit to death a cow which had lost its way in the woods.… In the spring and autumn the village was buried in mud.” In winter cockroaches “filled the cabin with their rustlings.”
Cattle, corn, and cartage brought Pokrovskoye a modest prosperity. The region was known for its butter and wheat. Though Trakt 4 was deeply rutted in summer and humped with ice mounds in winter, its travelers brought in rubles. Villagers lodged them, and hired out horses and telegas, unsprung carts in which passengers lay on hay with their knees to their chins to protect their spines against the incessant jars and twists. A telega, the American journalist George Kennan wrote, “will simply jolt a man’s soul out in less than twenty-four hours.” Bargemen and boatmen worked the river after ice melt.
Efim Rasputin, Grischa’s father, was a newcomer to the village. The villagers gave him the nickname Novykh, the “new one”; his son was sometimes to sign himself Grigory Novykh after he learned to write, or, more accurately, to scribble in a large and unformed hand. It was often said that the root of the name Rasputin was raspoutstvo, Russian for “debauchery,” and that it was foisted on the family as an accurate slur. The Rasputins themselves said that it came from raspoutye, “crossroads,” a more likely derivation since the name was uncommon but not unique. It was rumored that Efim had gotten drunk while working as a coachman at Saratov on the Volga, lost or sold his horses, and fled to Siberia.
The story was typical. Siberia was founded on runaways, religious dissenters, bankrupts, cutthroats, the swill of the frontier. Every few months convoys of convicts, gray columns with yellow diamonds sewn on their coats, shuffled in chains out of European Russia to cross the Ural Mountains west of Pokrovskoye. They were on their way to the huge holding prison in Tyumen, where they were crammed 160 to a cell to await transport to distant mines and logging camps. The air, Kennan found, was “laden with fever germs from unventilated hospital wards, fetid odors from diseased human lungs and unclean human bodies, and the stench arising from unemptied excrement buckets.” A third of the fifteen thousand prisoners who arrived at Tyumen each year in Grischa’s childhood did not survive to continue their journey; Siberians were aware of the lethal power of the distant tsar. Drivers like Efim, yamshchiki, were often ex-convicts and formed a distinct fraternity of chancers and smugglers. A group of Americans who crossed Siberia at this time employed six drivers, all of whom they found to be convicted murderers.
His fellow villagers knew Efim as a driver plying Trakt 4, with sidelines in farming and horse trading, and a drinker. In summer he wore a cotton blouse and coarse woolen trousers with sandals made of the plaited bark of lime trees. He added a sheepskin coat, an armiak cloth jacket, felt boots, and a fur cap above his basin haircut for winter. Grischa stayed faithful to peasant fashion in the days of his fame, though his boots were made of dressed leather and the empress embroidered his silken blouses.
Efim was comfortably off by village standards, rich by those of peasants in European Russia, whose crude, chimneyless huts were built of logs. His single-story cabin was double planked with four rooms, furnished with rough wooden benches. He had money enough to afford glass in the big windows, in place of the stretched animal bladders used by the poorest peasants. He had oil lamps, too, and not tallow candles, in front of the icons in the main room. Low barns ran around a muddy yard, pungent with animal and human dung heaps, where cattle and horses wintered. The family slept in their clothes on wooden shelves near a log-burning brick stove, with piles of bug-infested sheepskins for a mattress. A samovar simmered on the stove for tea; Grischa always thought coffee a sign of great wealth. He ate bread—white bread, he proudly recalled, rather than the brown bread suffered by peasants in European Russia—and fish and cabbage soup, from metal bowls. He chewed wild garlic against scurvy. Though the peasants shat in their yards, the village had a bathhouse where they sweated in a steam room and beat the dirt from their skin with birch twigs. Rasputin loved bathhouses, though he always retained a musty peasant odor that society ladies found “thrilling.”
Grischa did not start talking until he was two and a half. Then the words tumbled out with vivid imagination. Recovering from a bout of fever, he told his mother that a “beautiful lady” had sat at his bedside to soothe him. He helped with the livestock, rounding up cattle and herding them in the yard. He learned to ride in the arched bareback Siberian style. He had no schooling.
He collected kindling in the forests and played hide-and-seek with his elder brother, Mischa. Siberian children played brodyagi and soldiers. Brodyagi were escaped convicts. Each summer several hundred went loose until they were betrayed by bounty hunters or gave themselves up at the onset of winter. October was the high point of the year. At the village fete the children danced to an accordion, the girls in scarves and best dresses, while their parents sat mellow with vodka. Peddlers in black frock coats and black waistcoats with glass buttons sold cheap colored prints of the tsar and famous generals and views of St. Petersburg. It was a rare reminder of the Russia west of the Urals.
When the Russians had first penetrated Siberia three centuries before, the Cossack brigand Yermak Timofeyovich defeated the Tartars not far from Pokrovskoye. The frontier had long since passed east, but the region was still called Zatatarskoe Beloto, the “marsh beyond the Tartars.” It remained a place of superstition and legend, of miraculous icons and holy manifestations, where hunters flew through the air by telepathy. Spirits were said to live in the forests. Leshii, with bluish skin and goggle eyes, imitated birdsong, whistled and clapped, and protected convicts. The water spirit, vodyanoi, caused the Tura River to flood when it got drunk. In the cabins lurked the hairy domovoi, breaking windows or protecting the house according to its mood.
Little Grischa, his mother said, became so rapt in staring at the sky that at first she feared he was “not quite right in the head.” Then, along with his imagination, he developed powers. He had a way with animals and became a horse whisperer. Efim Rasputin had a favorite story of how his son’s gift first showed itself. Efim mentioned at the midday meal that a horse had gone lame and might have pulled a hamstring. Grischa got up from the table and went out to the barn. His father followed and saw him place his hand on the hamstring. Grischa stood in silence, eyes closed and head thrown back. When he was done he stepped back, patted the horse, and said: “You’re all better.” Efim led the horse out into the yard and walked it up and down. Its lameness had gone.
The boy became a sort of “spiritual veterinarian”—his daughter’s phrase—to the livestock of Pokrovskoye. He talked to sick cattle and horses, whose joints were distended by the strain of hauling carts on potholed roads, and cured them with a few whispers and a comforting hand. He extended his healing from the beasts of the field to the villagers. He eased away bad backs and fevers. Word spread that he was gifted with precognition and clairvoyance. He discovered missing objects—a ring, a rake, a plow. A horse was stolen. A meeting was called to discuss the theft. Grischa pointed at one of the richest peasants and declared that he was the thief. The villagers followed the man home, found the horse in his yard, and, in the Siberian fashion, beat him half to death.
Sitting in the warm, while his mother baked bread in the big stove, Grischa often suddenly chirped out, “A stranger is coming.” A traveler would be seen on the trakt within an hour. He also predicted deaths among the peasants, a less welcome gift that had his father muttering about the work of the dyavol, the devil.
This, at least, is what his daughter Maria wrote later. The provisional government inquiry found village witnesses to have a much less charitable view of her father. “They note that Rasputin’s father drank vodka heavily,” the investigator wrote. “As a boy Rasputin was always dirty and untidy so that boys of his age called him a ‘snotter.’ ” It served her father’s memory well, of course, for Maria to establish that his gifts were clear even in childhood. Some of her claims stretch belief to the limit; here they appear to sit oddly with those of his fellow villagers. The mature Rasputin, however, had the same genius as the child for creating apparently irreconcilable impressions; his character was magnetic, in the sense of polarity, repelling or attracting those who came within its field. There is no reason to disbelieve his daughter’s family recollections of his early ability to soothe; no reason either to reject the villagers’ account of a layabout in the making. Both traits run through his adult life.
When he was eight, Grischa lost his brother Mischa. The boys liked to swim in the river, whose waters, dark and rusty, were fed by bogs thick in iron salts. On airless August days they splashed in the shallows where the cattle drank. Picnickers took their spot one day, and the brothers went farther downstream. Mischa drifted out into the torpid current, dragging Grischa with him. A farmer pulled the boys out, but Mischa developed pneumonia. The Pokrovskoye midwife struggled to cope. Ten-year-old Mischa died.
Grischa became depressed, alternately moodily quiet and hyperactive. His mother found him difficult. “I never knew what to expect next,” she told her granddaughter. The boy wandered among the forest larch and birch or made a pest of himself around the house. He had no friends to take his brother’s place, and no stimulations to feed his imagination and intelligence. The outside world was guesswork. He had never seen an electric light, a steamboat, or a railroad train. He knew they existed—peddlers sold pictures of them—but none had yet reached Siberia. It was so vast, stretching north to the Arctic, south toward China, east for 4,000 miles to the Pacific, that Siberians lived on the outer margin of Russian consciousness. Tyumen was 2,543 versts from St. Petersburg—some 1,670 miles away—and, until the Trans-Siberian Railroad reached it in 1885, the journey took six weeks.
Grischa’s horizons were bound by the dull rhythms of the village and fieldwork. In the long winter the fields were frozen. Arctic air advanced from the Kara Sea in a crystal mantle, and dawn and sunset were chilled into bands of salmon pink and violet blue. By day the sun melted the snow on the cabin roofs though the air temperature remained below freezing. At night it could plunge to fifty below. When southwesterlies blew, violent storms dumped thick snow on Pokrovskoye, the falling flakes mingling with those blown from the ground in a maelstrom that blinded those foolhardy enough to venture outdoors. In spring the fields were plowed and planted, and firewood cut. In August, with temperatures sometimes climbing into the nineties, the men cut the wheat and rye with scythes in another brief burst of labor while the women followed with sickles to reap what was left. The grain was threshed with flails, iron chains attached to wooden handles. In the fall a string of cyclones brought heavy showers, and the village was mud bound. The cycle of drudgery then repeated itself.
Russia was alive elsewhere. It was throwing up great writers, musicians, and new industrialists; its revolutionaries were famed through Europe for their intensity and love of violence. The empire was still racing east at a thousand miles a decade, engorging the khanates of Central Asia. In Pokrovskoye, eternal silence was master. St. Petersburg was the dark side of the moon. Politics were irrelevant to the peasants; no politician came calling, they had no vote. Newspapers meant nothing to men who could not read. As to ideas, no university existed in Siberia’s 4.6 million square miles and none would until 1888. Grischa was listless and bored.
Monotony and vast and freezing distance often conspired to make Siberians religious. The beauty of the Orthodox service, the hypnotic chants, the ecstatic Easter “Christ Is Risen! Christ Is Risen!” fell on arid minds like mystic liquid. Wandering pilgrims in rags, stranniky, passed through Pokrovskoye on the trakt, tapping on doors and asking for a night’s lodgings as they made their way east to the Abalatsky Monastery or northwest to pray before the relics at Verkhoturye. Icons, the face of the Virgin or a saint blazing from a background of somber oils, were paraded at every event; they followed the dead to the cemetery and newlyweds to the marriage bed. On Sundays incense and the priest’s rich vestments replaced shabby work clothes and the interminable odor of farm animals. Singing and ceremony—Grischa always loved to sing—were bridges to the unimaginable outside world, which he craved. Candles caught the gleam of the icons and the bright kerchiefs of the women. Illiterate, bookless minds filled with stories of damnation and salvation.
At a service when Grischa was fourteen, the village priest, Otyets Pavel, read a passage from the Bible that impressed him. “The Kingdom of God cometh not with observation,” the priest said. “Neither say they, Lo here! or Lo there! for behold the Kingdom of God is within you.” His parents walked home for their Sunday meal. Grischa wandered off to the woods and experienced ecstasy under a big larch tree.
He lay on the ground, lost in meditation. A scintilla, a spark, grew in his mind, “nearer and nearer, brightening as it came, until what had been a soft golden glow suddenly erupted in a blinding white flash.” The boy prayed, tears wetting his face. Then he raced home to tell his mother: “I can only say … I almost saw God.” She was frightened, fearing blasphemy. “Only great saints can see God,” she told him. “Whatever you do, don’t tell your father. He’d certainly punish you.” Years later Rasputin took his own children back to the larch tree. He told them how he had realized, on that Sunday, that “God is here, inside, this moment—forever.”
Efim Rasputin worried about his son. Grischa did little work on the farm, although he was a strong, sturdy lad whose voice acquired the low tones and unstressed, booming vowels of the Siberian accent as it broke. He mooned about, without friends. Sometimes he got into fights with other boys who called him malodushni. It is curious that they used that word, “coward,” for Rasputin showed great nerve in adult life. He was shrewd, though, and skilled at tactical withdrawals; perhaps the boys used it in that sense. He did not feel lonely. “God is my companion,” he told his mother of his religious experience.
As an adult Rasputin often referred to his childhood flashes of insight into the divine. His religious intensity was natural in a country shot through with Christian fervor, and Siberia gave those whom it did not cow a matching wildness and grandeur of spirit. His sense of the presence of God was unforced and simple, a part of his belief in himself, as strong a streak in him as his sexuality. The evidence of his first sexual experience comes secondhand, from his daughter. She maintained that it was a pseudo-rape at the hands of a general’s wife, and that it affected him deeply. The investigator noted nothing more than a healthy interest in village girls. The alleged incident took place when Grischa drove a grain cart to Tyumen.
The woman in question was Madame Irina Kubasova, the striking daughter of an artillery colonel, who had married her off at eighteen to his commanding officer to settle his gambling debts. General Kubasov was forty years older than his bride. He resigned his commission, quit his regimental quarters in Moscow, and retired to his estate outside Tyumen to enjoy her.
He saw a young blonde in a carriage in the main street, and followed her in his cart until she disappeared through the crested iron gates of the Kubasov estate. He sat on a wall for some time before driving home. He saw the carriage outside a fashionable clothes shop on his next visit. A lady’s maid crossed the street. “My mistress bids me give you this message,” she said. “In one hour, you are to take a seat upon a certain wall. I think you know the place.”
Grischa drove out of town and sat on the wall, swinging his feet, gazing across lawns that were as large as the Rasputin farm. A pond lay beneath a slope, crossed by a rustic footbridge that led to a summerhouse. Irina Kubasova arrived in a “cascade of golden curls … a dress of some pale green material, tight in the bodice to show off her sensual breasts.” Maria Rasputin described how her father was led to the summerhouse, where, reaching down the front of his trousers, Kubasova “grasped him gently, releasing him for a moment, then touching him again.” She went into the next room, telling Grischa to come to her quickly.
Stripping off his clothes, Grischa followed her into a darkened chamber, where she lay, still fully clothed, on a sofa. She raised a shapely arm and said, “Teper!” “Now!” At this, four maidservants burst into the room from behind the heavy curtains. A fifth girl stepped forward with a bucket of cold water and threw it over him. The maids, urged on by their mistress, were on him “like a pack of she-wolves tearing at a stray lamb, teasing and tormenting him, touching his outthrust organ in those lascivious ways that only as a group would they have dared employ.” It was a divertissement, a cruel game played by a bored young woman. Once they had finished with him, the girls carried Grischa out and threw him on the ground in front of the summerhouse. One of them, Dunia Bekyeshova, took pity on him and left him his clothes.
Humiliated, “his whole being one amorphous mass of unadulterated misery,” the sixteen-year-old returned to Pokrovskoye in his cart, shivering in a blanket on the rough wooden seat. The episode left him with nightmares, in which the women became she-wolves who tore at his flesh, urged on by Irina Kubasova. His mother knew something was wrong; but he was too ashamed to tell anyone, sitting hangdog in the barn with only his favorite horse, Ivan, for company.
The incident did no long-term harm to Rasputin’s remarkable sexual self-confidence; he enjoyed a natural and easygoing affinity with women until his death. Shortly after the incident a young village widow, Natalya Petrovna Stepanova, took a wanderer into her cabin and her bed. She was spotted by the local gossip, the splyenitza, who alerted the village. Efim Rasputin was one of those who caught her in flagrante and hauled her off to Otyets Pavel. The priest proclaimed the punishment for a woman caught in sin; she was to be stripped naked and whipped out of the village.
Her dress was ripped off—Maria says by Efim Akovlevich, Rasputin’s father—her hair was shorn with shears, and she was tied to the saddle of a horse. The horse dragged her between a double line of vengeful villagers, eyes popping with lust, lips drawn back in snarls, who beat her with sticks and leather straps. Years later, Rasputin told his daughter, he was “still horrified at the memory.” Bleeding and unconscious, Natalya Petrovna was pulled out of the village. Grischa found her in a field. He comforted her. As he touched each of the wounds in turn, the bleeding stopped. The bruises disappeared. He washed the mud from her and built her a shelter. Later he brought her an old dress from home, a pair of shoes, a kerchief to hide her head, and a can of borscht.
The following day Grischa attended a village wedding. Two boys gave him vodka; unused to the fiery spirit, he almost choked on it. The lads talked about finding a woman. Grischa, drunk, said he knew where one was. He led them to Natalya Petrovna’s refuge. Their noisy arrival terrified her. Grischa insisted they leave her in peace, before rushing off awash with tears and guilt.
Slowly his mysticism returned. After his farm work he went to the forest to pray. “I have been dreaming about God since early childhood,” he recollected to a journalist from the paper Novoye Vremya two decades later. “When I was fifteen, in my village, in the summertime, when the sun shone warmly and the birds sang heavenly songs, I walked along the path and did not dare go along the middle of it. I was dreaming about God. My soul was longing to fly to afar. I often wept and did not know where the tears came from and what they were for.”
His youth passed in “some kind of meditation, a kind of dream.” He believed in the good, he said, and he was loved in the village. He had long talks with his comrades “about God, about nature, about birds.” He often sat with the old men of the village, listening to their stories about the lives of the saints, about selflessness and great deeds, about the tsars and Ivan the Terrible …
When he was eighteen the brilliant heavenly light returned to him. He was plowing when it exploded from the furrows, becoming a vision of the Virgin, surrounded by throbbing light, her hand above his head in a gesture of blessing. Trembling, he led the plow horse back to the barn. It was, he told his daughter, his “awakening.”
Moments of prayer and generosity ran side by side with epic debauchery in Rasputin’s later life. It is no surprise that the introverted, sensitive boy and the forest mysticism he described to Novoye Vremya were strangers to the investigator. His witnesses remembered a lout, a hardnose with a swagger. “Rasputin started to drink vodka at fifteen, and after his marriage at twenty started to drink more,” he reported. Villagers gave evidence that the “snotter” was also a thief.
At age nineteen he met a girl from another village to whom he was to remain faithful, in his own fashion, for the rest of his life. They met at a festival at the Abalatsky Monastery; they both loved to dance and sing. She was three years older, a pretty girl with dark eyes and blond hair, Praskovya Fedorovna Dubrovina. They married following a six-month courtship. The year is uncertain; the investigator did not give it, but it was probably 1889. She was a tolerant woman. Her new husband continued to spend his evenings in the kabachok, the tavern. Grischa remained a slob in village opinion, with his father’s taste for knocking back cheap Siberian vodka from wax-topped bottles, and an eye for anything left lying around.
“He was known to the villagers as a man who liked drinking and leading a depraved life,” wrote the obituarist Alexander Yablonsky. “His usual pastimes were drinking, debauchs, fights and vile abuse.… He used to go to Tyumen to get bread or hay and came back home without money, drunk, beaten, and often without horses.” The tutor to the imperial family, Pierre Gilliard, made no bones about Rasputin’s thieving. “Like everybody else, he looked around for things unguarded or forgotten and stole them,” he wrote. “Soon he distinguished himself with boldness in these ventures while his dissipation gave him the reputation of a reckless reveler.”
A witness, E. I. Kartavtsev, gave similar evidence. He was sixty-seven years old at the time of the investigation and a neighbor of the Rasputin family in Pokrovskoye. “I caught Grigory stealing my fence poles,” he said. “He had cut them up and put them in his cart and was about to drive off when I caught him in the act. I demanded that Grigory take them to the constable, and when he refused and made to strike me with an ax, I, in my turn, hit him with a perch so hard that blood ran out of his nose and his mouth in a stream and he fell to the ground unconscious. At first I thought I’d killed him. When he started to move I made him come to take him to the constable. Rasputin didn’t feel like going, but I hit him several times with a fist in the face, after which he went to the constable voluntarily.”
Soon after the theft of the poles, Kartavtsev said that a pair of his horses were stolen from his meadow. “On the night of the theft I guarded these horses myself,” he told the investigator. “I saw that Rasputin approached them with his pals, Konstantin and Trofim, but I didn’t think much of it until a few hours later I discovered the horses were not there. Right after that I went home to check whether Rasputin was in. He was there the following day, but his pals had gone.”
Others characterized the teenage Rasputin “as a sly, impudent man, of wild, loose, and effusive nature.” When drunk he showed off by harnessing his father’s horses and galloping them around the yard. He “used foul language in front of not only strangers but his parents as well.” It was a habit he kept; he used drunken oaths to shock people he wished to unsettle, and admitted as much to Novoye Vremya. “When life touched me,” Rasputin told the newspaper, “I used to hide somewhere in a corner and pray secretly. I was unsatisfied, couldn’t find an answer to many things. And I was sad and I took to drinking.”
After the thefts of the poles and the Kartavtsev horses, the villagers met to discuss exiling Rasputin and his comrades to eastern Siberia. Konstantin and Trofim were expelled from the community for horse stealing. Rasputin survived, but he faced charges of stealing the poles in the local court. He was also accused of stealing a consignment of furs that went missing as he was driving them by cart to Tyumen; he counterclaimed that he had been attacked by robbers. He abruptly left the village for Verkhoturye Monastery, more than 250 miles to the northwest, a place famous for its relics of St. Simeon the Just. The visit was decisive; all witnesses say that he was profoundly changed on his return. They do not agree on why he went. “Soon God brought me to reason,” he said himself. “I gave up drinking, I followed another path.”
Rasputin always denied being a thief. Slyly, he told his daughter that, since he was convinced that other people shared his second sight, and so could track down any stolen object, he could never bring himself to steal. She believed his departure was the result of giving a ride to a young divinity student in his cart. He told the student of his mystic experiences. Deeply impressed, the student urged him to do God’s bidding and go to the monastery to seek advice from the monks. In an agony of indecision, Rasputin knelt in front of the family icon in the early hours to pray for guidance. His wife found him. The young couple talked it over and decided that he should leave for the monastery.
Rasputin spun a similar story to the imperial family. He told them, the tutor Gilliard reported, that he was hired to drive a priest to the monastery. The priest found the lad to have an eager intelligence and natural gifts. He made Grischa confess to his sins and tried to make him devote his ill-used ardor to God. “These persuasions impressed Grigory so much that he was filled with the wish to abandon his dark and dissolute life,” Gilliard wrote. “He stayed in the Verkhoturye Monastery for a long time.” In the Yablonsky variation, Grischa was hired to drive to Tyumen by a young theological student, Miletiy Zaborovsky, who later distinguished himself as rector of the Tomsk seminary. As they drove, “Zaborovsky made a strong impression upon him and held this influence upon him for a long time.” It was, Yablonsky says, this telega fare who inspired Rasputin to leave for the monastery.
The truth seems simpler. At the time, the investigator reported, Rasputin “said he had to do it instead of his father, who had made a vow to walk to this monastery on foot, but that was a pretense.” Witnesses told him that Rasputin had stirred up so much trouble for himself that he thought it best to make himself scarce. Better a stint in a monastery than a criminal record.