Holy Terror

By Melvin Maddocks

THE LIFE AND TIMES

OF GRIGORII RASPUTIN by Alex de Jonge

Coward, McCann & Geoghegan 368 pages; $17.95

On the night of July 19, 1907, Alexei, the only son of Nicholas and Alexandra, the Tsar and Tsarina of Imperial Russia, lay in his bed, hemorrhaging. The four-year-old suffered from hemophilia--the hereditary "bleeder" disease for which turn-of-the-century medicine knew no remedy. In desperation the father and mother sent for a holy man, then the rage of St. Petersburg society.

The bedside scene has been reported: "The child . . . began to bubble with laughter. Rasputin laughed too. He laid his hand on the boy's leg and the bleeding stopped at once. 'There's a good boy,' said Rasputin. 'You'll be all right.' "

The same could not be said of Russia. "Rasputin took the empire by stopping the bleeding of the Tsarevich," the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane observed. Alas, the empire was hemorrhaging too, and the hypnotic Siberian peasant only exacerbated that wound.

Alex de Jonge--an Oxford professor of Russian ancestry--takes Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin's rise to power to be one of history's tragic jokes. The Tsarina thought Rasputin a saint because he could apparently heal her son; and because he was a saint, he must be heeded in all matters. The Tsar did not lag far behind in credulity.

Little is known about Rasputin's early life. The man who told the Tsar who succeeding ministers should be and where to deploy troops appears to have been an ex-horse thief. Certainly he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. At the end of a night spent listening to gypsy music, he would reel after prostitutes, the gold cross the Tsarina had given him swinging from his neck.

Yet this drunken lecher with insolent ambitions had the power to make troubled people feel better--to lighten souls, as De Jonge puts it. Animals and children loved him. In his own way he wanted to be what the Tsar and Tsarina believed him to be: the savior of Holy Russia. But even if Rasputin had been an angel, he would have been too late. "A kind of frenzy has seized people," Princess Catherine Radziwill wrote in 1913. Russia had turned into a "very large lunatic asylum" of manic searchers, from table-tapping spiritualists to bomb-tossing anarchists. The whole country seemed possessed by demons and redeemers--and who could tell the difference?

Prince Felix Yusupov believed he was saving Holy Russia too, when, after midnight on Dec. 17, 1916, he lured Rasputin to his palace and fed him cream cakes laced with cyanide. When the poison failed to take effect, the prince shot him. Left for dead on the floor, Rasputin opened one mad eye, then leaped up in an attempt to strangle his shocked assassin. Another conspirator had to fire more bullets. When the corpse was dragged out of the river near Petrovsky Bridge, water was found in the lungs. In the end, Rasputin may have drowned. Siberian peasants do not die easily.

Biographers of Rasputin tend to take on the disorder of their subject. De Jonge is no exception, but he does the one essential thing--keeps his theories loose and rides the tiger where it takes him, in a deadly little circle. The Tsarevich, whose life Rasputin had saved less than ten years before, died 18 months after him at the hands of his own assassins, along with his father, mother, sisters, Jimmy the family spaniel and, of course, Holy Russia. In pronouncing his private curse, the French tutor to the imperial family, Pierre Gilliard, also spoke history's final word on Rasputin: "The fatal influence of that man was the principal cause of death of those who thought to find in him their salvation." --By Melvin Maddocks

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