Grigori Rasputin’s name is beyond notorious. He has entered popular legend and even popular song The myths surrounding him have swollen out of all proportion.
Rasputin, although a barely literate peasant from Siberia, is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern history. In a bizarre reversal of the Great Man Theory of History, he had no official position and no mass following, yet unintentionally he became the major contributor to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world. As Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Provisional government after the February 1917 Revolution, observed: ‘Without Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin.’
The Empress Alexandra’s infatuation with Rasputin, the only person who could heal her son, convinced many that she was sleeping with him. This was totally untrue, yet as a result, the Tsar himself appeared a weak and complacent cuckold. In Russia’s deeply patriarchal society such impressions, however false, shattered the myth of Romanov power. Outrageously untrue rumours that Rasputin was even sleeping with their teenage daughters fed a growing taste for scandal. By the time of the popular uprising of February1917, the Tsar had lost so much respect that not a single officer from the Imperial Life Guard regiments in Petrograd was prepared to raise a sword in his defence. When a ruling regime loses confidence in itself, revolution is easy.
Rasputin’s vertiginous rise to influence had been so improbable that the story gripped not just Greater Russia, but foreign countries too. How could a simple peasant, a self-proclaimed ‘Man of God’, achieve such power between his arrival in Saint Petersburg in 1905 and his murder in December 1916? One should not forget the saying of the great 19th Century poet, Fyodor Tyutchev, that Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone. Neither can Rasputin. He combined spiritual innocence and rampant lust; intense religious faith and cynical opportunism; boasting and paranoia; self-knowledge and fantasy; instinctive generosity and cupidity. All the intriguing paradoxes of his character, as well as the astonishing story of his life and death, defy conventional logic.
The Tsar’s head of security General Spiridovich wrote later on the basis of police agent reports: ‘He used to lie on a bed with a naked woman, talking to her while forcing himself to conquer the desire to possess her.’ This curious mortification of the flesh had echoes of a forbidden sect dating back to the 17th Century, known as the Khlysti or ‘Whips’. Rasputin was often thought to be a member. Their strange secret ceremonies took place in cellars and caves. They included speaking in tongues, and wild circular dancing like whirling dervishes, which supposedly were followed by stripping naked, whipping and mass fornication. The Khlysti believed that you had to sin so that you could repent, a line which Rasputin used as central to his seduction technique.
As that great Russian scholar Sir Bernard Pares emphasised, ‘Rasputin’s life was an extraordinary alternation of erotics and devotion.’ Rasputin received the call of God in his late 20s. Soon afterwards in 1897 he announced his intention to take to the road as a wandering Pilgrim, or strannik. In the latter part of 1904 Rasputin moved to the ancient Tatar city of Kazan on the Volga, invited by a wealthy widow whom he had met and impressed on one of his journeys. She proceeded to present him to the local worthies and grandees, and news of his ability to heal spread rapidly. He prayed with the afflicted and managed to console the grieving. He also won over important local churchmen, yet rumours soon spread of his visits to bath-houses with young women whom he persuaded to wash him in a most intimate way. The banya was the perfect place for Rasputin’s rhetorical card-trick of turning temptation into purification. He is said to have seduced two sisters, one of twenty and one of only fifteen, in the banya. Their mother, discovering their whereabouts too late, rushed to the banya but arrived as they emerged with a smiling Rasputin. ‘Now you may feel at peace,’ he greeted her. ‘The day of salvation has dawned for your daughters’.
Rasputin’s dramatic advancement came soon afterwards. A senior churchman in Kazan was impressed by him and recommended him to an even more influential bishop in Saint Petersburg. In November 1905, Rasputin was introduced to Tsar Nicholas and the Empress. The timing could hardly have been more fortunate. Nicholas was dejected after the disaster of the war against Japan and the resulting disorders all over Russia bringing the country close to revolution. He felt humiliated because he had been forced to agree to the calling of a Parliament – the Duma – and a first step towards a constitution which undermined the illusion of Romanov autocracy.
Not surprisingly, word of the imperial family’s interest in the Siberian peasant spread and social success followed rapidly in some of the great houses of the capital where a fin-de-siècle fascination with spiritualism flourished. Many women were fascinated by Rasputin, almost falling at his feet, while most men tended to react against him. This was largely because he conspicuously refused to conform to the behaviour of polite society. Whether princess or housemaid, he addressed everyone with the familiar ty. He embraced and kissed on first introduction, charming some and appalling others with his peasant manners and impudently direct questions. The composure of his female devotees, soon dubbed Rasputinières, was undoubtedly disturbed. There were grand ladies who volunteered to cut his fingernails so that they could take clippings as sacred talismans to sew into their dresses. Even pieces of half-chewed food from his plate were seized as semi-holy objects.
Rasputin, despite the dislike of most men, soon became the talk of the town. Grand hostesses competed in giving dinners to introduce him to their friends. They would also use him to draw in other famous names, and Rasputin himself might also ask his hostesses to invite somebody he wanted to meet.
Vera Zhukovskaya was an intrepid young graduate from a highly intellectual background in Kiev. In 1914, she travelled to Saint Petersburg just to meet Rasputin whose fame or notoriety had spread right across the Russian empire. Well-connected in scholarly circles, she persuaded A.S. Prugavin, the most distinguished expert on the different religious sects in Russia to accompany her to meet him.
‘The whole city was secretly talking about his closeness to the Tsaritsa and about his wild orgies at night’, she wrote. ‘No one, however, dared speak loudly for fear of paying a price for it later. He, meanwhile, was doing his secret dark business, entrenched somewhere in the very heart of the crazed capital. When they reached Rasputin’s apartment, it was clear that ‘the Man of God’ was furious that she had not come alone. He soon calmed down, excited by Zhukovskaya’s presence and began his seduction routine based on his favorite argument. ‘Without sin there is no life because there is no repentance, and without repentance there is no joy.’ He started to call her Honey-Bee or Little Bee. ‘Everything is allowed,’ he assured her. ‘Don’t believe priests, they are stupid, they don’t know the whole secret, and I will tell you the whole truth. Sin is given to us in order to make us repent, and repentance is joy for one’s soul and strength for one’s body, you see? Sin is the most important thing in life’. During this time, Rasputin had insinuated himself next to Zhukovskaya and had begun to stroke her. Prugavin watched closely but forced himself to stay silent. ‘I am caressing you in front of him’, Rasputin said. ‘And that’s fine by him. That’s the way I am, I can’t do anything without caressing because it is through the body that I discover somebody’s soul.’
Rasputin began fondling Zhukovskaya’s knee. ‘So, little bee, will you be visiting me?’ he said. ‘You are my sweet little berry!’ His breathing became hoarse as he began to stroke and then squeeze her breasts. She stood up and announced firmly that it was time for her to go. Sensing that she would be back, Rasputin made no attempt to stop her departure.
Rasputin was compulsively tactile, although this was not necessarily sexual in intent. At one point he shocked the Tsar’s sister Grand Duchess Olga by starting to stroke her shoulder as they sat together. His influence worked best if he could make an immediate physical contact with people, especially those bound by rigid conventions. ‘That’s the way I am,’ he said later to one young woman. ‘I can’t do without caressing as it is through the body that I learn somebody’s soul, you see?’
On the whole this approach was successful. His voice and his stroking caresses, accompanied by his ability to listen to their sad stories, could hardly have been more different from the cold disinterest of their husbands. In Saint Petersburg’s aloof, overtly masculine society, empathy with women was indeed a rare talent. Many remarked on his extraordinary powers of perception. He seemed to be the only man they had ever met who truly understood them.
His treatment of women, however, varied with their rank. His seduction of ladies from grand families was cautious at first, but once he had succeeded he treated them in a casual, even insulting fashion. He was said to have seduced, perhaps even raped the Tsarevich’s beautiful nursemaid Maria Vishnyakova. The Empress showed no sympathy. She refused to believe any word against ‘Our Friend’, as she called Rasputin. She instead told the Grand Duchess Olga, that Vishnyakova had been found in bed with a Cossack officer of the Imperial Convoy.
Every scandal Rasputin caused was dismissed by the Empress. Some stories probably were invented. A trap was said to have been laid by a Finnish ballet dancer called Lisa Tansin. She is supposed to have got him drunk and then had him photographed naked with prostitutes. Whether true or not any attempt to blacken Rasputin’s name proved counterproductive. They simply convinced the Empress even more firmly that he was a saint unfairly reviled and persecuted out of evil jealousy.
Major General Globachev, the head of the St Petersburg secret police, the Okhrana, was responsible for Rasputin’s security. ‘Most of his friends were women’, he wrote, ‘Lady admirers who believed in him as if he were a saint. Many of them were on close intimate terms with him, while others were still striving for that honour. The belief in Rasputin’s saintliness was so strong that women kissed his hands, took food from his hands, and willingly tolerated his insults and rudeness considering themselves to be especially fortunate. Rasputin was always affectionate and tender with new women whom he referred to as still unsaved, but he was especially rude to those with whom he was already intimate. I do not think that he favoured one woman over another. He did not demonstrate any true love for anyone of his lovers. His attraction to women were simply lust and depravity. Often when he was bored of his volunteer harem, he made use of common street prostitutes. As for women with whom he did not have intimate relations, he tried to win them over with his amazing ability to influence their souls, creating for himself an aura of holiness and blind faith.’
According to Zhukovskaya, Rasputin had become totally corrupted by his sexual obsession. ‘He has created his own theory’, she wrote, ‘that one should commit sins in the lower part so that there would be more light in the upper part.’ Rasputin’s wife, Praskovya, a simple women of great intelligence, was unconcerned by her husband’s activities in Saint Petersburg. She simply felt sorry for him in the belief that he truly suffered from his lust, a similar idea to that supposedly Sophoclean notion that the male of the species was chained to the lunatic of his libido.
But Praskovya never heard of the fate of more vulnerable, even desperate women from the lower orders who sought Rasputin’s help to gain exemption for a husband or son from front-line service in the army. Stepan Beletsky, the minister for police, soon became aware of what he called Rasputin’s ‘peculiar handling of lady supplicants’, especially the poorer and more vulnerable ones. This was a euphemism for blackmail and up to and including outright rape.
Beletsky recounted the case of one poor woman who had spent almost all her savings to come to the capital, hoping to save her husband from the military call-up. Rasputin made her an ultimatum either to obey his demands, and he would then ask the sovereign to help her, or never show up again. Neither her tears, nor her pleas, nor the mentioning of her children helped. He took advantage of her nervous state and seized her by force even though there were people in the room next door. He then visited her several times at her hotel, always reassuring her that her case was about to be resolved.
Zhukovskaya described Rasputin and his mercurial moods switching between spirituality and lust. ‘Everything changes when one remembers this strange man, with his soft husky voice, his narrow and pale lips folded into a mysterious grin, the magnetic gaze of the pale eyes where one can momentarily see someone else, terrifying, powerful, lovingly beckoning you into the impenetrable forest. He can willingly take you there but getting out is going to be your own problem. He has an amazing ability to change in a moment, like a magician. One moment he is a simple, illiterate man, coarse, scratching himself. But all of a sudden he turns into an inspired prophet, a bearer of a secret that only he is able to understand, and offers to take you to some summits of spiritual discoveries where sin and truth are intertwined like old friends.’
From Rasputin: Downfall of the Romanovs. Used with permission of Penguin Random House. Copyright © 2026 by Antony Beevor.
