{"id":814,"date":"2004-05-11T13:59:16","date_gmt":"2004-05-11T17:59:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=814"},"modified":"2024-10-27T18:13:17","modified_gmt":"2024-10-27T22:13:17","slug":"so-rasputin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=814","title":{"rendered":"So.  Rasputin."},"content":{"rendered":"<p><iframe style=\"width:120px;height:240px;\" marginwidth=\"0\" marginheight=\"0\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" src=\"\/\/ws-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/widgets\/q?ServiceVersion=20070822&#038;OneJS=1&#038;Operation=GetAdHtml&#038;MarketPlace=US&#038;source=ac&#038;ref=tf_til&#038;ad_type=product_link&#038;tracking_id=thesheivari-20&#038;marketplace=amazon&#038;region=US&#038;placement=0345438310&#038;asins=0345438310&#038;linkId=SATMG6UR5PVHQLEX&#038;show_border=true&#038;link_opens_in_new_window=true\"><br \/>\n<\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>\nRasputin is on my mind because I am deeply engrossed at the moment in <i>Nicholas and Alexandra<\/i> &#8211; sent to me off my Wish List from MikeR &#8211; Yeah!  It&#8217;s a story I am highly familiar with, because of my other reading:  toppling of autocratic regimes by OTHER autocratic regimes &#8230; the history of Russia, in general, etc etc.  I read some other book years ago, just focusing on Alexandra &#8211; but it wasn&#8217;t very good, as I recall.  Really the one to read is <i>Nicholas and Alexandra<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>Now I can see why.<\/p>\n<p>The author, Robert Massie, began writing a book, originally, about hemophilia, and the history of hemophilia.  He has a son who is a hemophiliac (<i>an<\/i> hemophiliac?) and so, naturally, he was drawn to the history of various royal families, since they all seem to have major problems with hemophiliacs popping up in every other generation.  It&#8217;s called &#8220;the royal disease&#8221; for that reason.<\/p>\n<p>But slowly, as his research unfolded, and as he came to know these people a bit more, he realized a couple of things:<\/p>\n<p>Their story had not been fully told yet, as amazing as that is.<\/p>\n<p>Apparently, when he and his publishers were deciding what to call the book, and his suggestion was the plain-and-simple &#8220;Nicholas and Alexandra&#8221;, the publishers rejected it because they didn&#8217;t think anyone would know what the names meant or referred to.  Of course, historians knew &#8211; but general public?  No. It was a different time. Because of Massie&#8217;s book, primarily, which has continued to sell and sell and sell, over the years, &#8220;Nicholas and Alexandra&#8221; entered the langauge.)<\/p>\n<p>And he also realized the multiple layers of the Russian revolution &#8211; the what came <i>before<\/i> and how essential that was.<\/p>\n<p>His contention is that the hemophilia of the Tsar&#8217;s son and heir, combined with the mystical hold Rasputin had over the Empress Alexandra &#8211; were the primary reasons that the &#8220;empire&#8221; fell apart. One could not have happened without the other.  And Lenin just took advantage of a disintegrating process that was already occurring.<\/p>\n<p>Alexandra seems &#8230; how to say this &#8230; a little bit nuts, quite frankly.<\/p>\n<p>Massie quotes extensively from her letters.  He makes it clear that she wrote so many letters, and in such a florid overblown style, that they are very difficult to get through, it is hard to know where to start, and her overblown emotionalism make them almost unbearably boring and repetitive.  Researchers get lost in her prose, and it is very hard to analyze.  Or even make sense of it.<\/p>\n<p>But what Massie pulls out of the pile of letters (found in a suitcase in the Siberian basement where the family was massacred) is quote after quote after quote having to do with Rasputin.<\/p>\n<p>Government positions were filled based on the sole factor of whether or not this person got along with &#8220;Our Friend&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Is he not Our Friend&#8217;s enemy?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>She clearly had an enormous hold over her husband&#8217;s will, and Rasputin insinuated himself in between the two.<\/p>\n<p>What an absolutely disgusting (and yet riveting) character Rasputin is.  He seems almost mythical &#8211; like he can&#8217;t have been really real.  And the role he played in the crashing of the empire was so perfectly planned &#8211; it almost seems like he was created solely for historical purposes.<\/p>\n<p>What amazes me is how duped she was by him.  Massie goes on and on about Rasputin&#8217;s hypocrisy, his nastiness, his double-sided character (pious with the Tsar and Tsarina, and then a raving drunken maniac with everyone else) &#8211; Everyone else seems to have caught on except for Alexandra.  Rasputin had arrived at key moments during her son&#8217;s hemorrhages, and appeared to stop the bleeding, merely by speaking softly to her son.  And so she had this intense (I would say, fervent and fanatical) belief in his powers.  He was a Man of God.  If he approved of so-and-so as Ministry of Interior, then that so-and-so was blessed by God.  Even if the so-and-so had never held a government position in his life.<\/p>\n<p>Alexandra ignored the signs.  Willfully.  When confronted with evidence of Rasputin&#8217;s true character, the rapes, the binges, and also the nasty things he said in public about her and his hold over her, she refused to believe it.<\/p>\n<p>Scott Peck, in his chilling book <i>People of the Lie<\/i> defines evil as (and sorry, I&#8217;m paraphrasing):  people who refuse to look inward, people who <i>refuse<\/i> to change.  It takes an act of will to stay the same.  Peck calls this &#8220;evil&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>There seems to be a lot of People of the Lie stuff going on with Alexandra.  She believed totally in autocracy, pretty much because she wanted to make sure her son&#8217;s legacy was fulfilled.  Without autocracy, her son would be nothing, nada.  She was filled with these vague and mystical &#8220;feelings&#8221; about things, which she would then pass onto her husband, who more often than not based his policies, his policies of food distribution and even his military tactics during World War I, on Alexandra&#8217;s gut &#8220;feelings&#8221; about something.  She even wrote to him once telling him that he should stop the Russian offensive because &#8220;Our Friend&#8221; [Rasputin] had a dream foretelling doom.<\/p>\n<p>It is astonishing.  Truly.  The level of impact he had.<\/p>\n<p>It baffles me.  I guess I would like to meet him (well, that is, if he hadn&#8217;t been shot multiple times, bashed over the head, and then drowned &#8211; yes, none of the rest of that stuff killed him, it was the <i>drowning<\/i> that got him), just to see for myself what the big deal was.  Even people who hated him attested to his great magnetism.  People who were repulsed by his power still acknowledged this &#8220;thing&#8221; that he had.  One of the members of the Duma describes vividly having to actively resist being hypnotized by Rasputin, during a conversation.<\/p>\n<p>Fascinatingly vile character.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Rasputin is on my mind because I am deeply engrossed at the moment in Nicholas and Alexandra &#8211; sent to me off my Wish List from MikeR &#8211; Yeah! It&#8217;s a story I am highly familiar with, because of my &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=814\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[15],"tags":[1583,150],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=814"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101341,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/814\/revisions\/101341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}