The year 1917, according to the new style, began for Russia with an unnoticed, but extremely unpleasant event in the newspapers. On the morning of January 3 (or December 21, according to the old style), Nicholas II arrived at a secret funeral near Tsarskoye Selo Alexandrovsky Park. The emperor wrote in his diary: “At 9 o'clock. the whole family drove past the photographic building and to the right to the field, where they were present at the sad picture: the coffin with the body of the unforgettable Grigory, who was killed on the night of December 17 by monsters in F. Yusupov's house. A little more than two months remained before the autocrat's abdication from the throne.
There is hardly any other such political murder in our history that was met with such genuine enthusiasm by society. The fact is that the killers of Grigory R. - Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and Duma deputy Vladimir Purishkevich - in fact did not shoot at a real man from the village of Pokrovskoye, but at a legendary image familiar to everyone at that time.
The mythologization of Rasputin was well understood by Vasily Rozanov, who believed that he "drowned in a sea of anecdotes about him, which the more - the more they obscure the essence of the matter from us." And the essence of the matter is more boring than the oral stories that flew across Russia to the very outskirts, and then became a world famous and profitable export product, right up to the famous song "Boni M". The historian with his meticulous analysis is initially a loser here: if rumors from memoirs can still be blocked by a reliable source, then there is simply nothing to fight with the melodies and rhythms of foreign pop music. The legend triumphs, either seductively dancing in the already old disco style, then seriously mesmerizing the viewer with the characters of Alexei Petrenko, Vladimir Mashkov or Gerard Depardieu.
After the revolution, somehow there were no illegitimate children of Rasputin, no crowds of "mistresses" seduced by him
To separate the real Rasputin from the volumes and films of entertaining mythology is possible, perhaps, only by refusing to look at this person through the types of glasses that have been familiar for more than a century. For a start, it is easier to remove mystical eyepieces, which was suggested on the pages of RG on December 1 by the main fighter against pseudoscience, academician Yevgeny Aleksandrov, who doubts the hypnotic abilities of the “elder” and is convinced that “there is no clairvoyance, no telepathy, no“biolocation and telekinesis. Next, we will erase one more random feature and get rid of the burning erotic gaze. His relations with the ladies do not fit into the tempting stereotype of "love machine", brought by Valentin Pikul to the immense ("led women into the forest in clouds"): in 1917, under the Provisional Government, interested in demonizing the symbol of the "damned tsarist regime",there were no illegitimate children of Rasputin, no crowds of "mistresses" seduced by him. Finally, it would be nice to take off the geopolitical glasses, sometimes even cash from those authors who are skeptical about the already mentioned legends. To elevate Rasputin's love of peace to an absolute and to believe that the "elder" could convince the monarch not to get involved in the First World War is at least naive.
What will remain in the "bottom line"? Certainly not the character of Olga Forsh - "a fatal man who flattened the throne with his heavy butt." An intelligent man from the people, not only endowed with, as Alexei Varlamov correctly noted, “the gift of consolation,” but also capable of quickly and successfully adapting in a completely unfamiliar environment, including the royal palaces. Something real was noticed in Rasputin by two contemporaries who were involved in his mythologization - Alexey Tolstoy and Felix Yusupov. The writer saw that “attentive, intelligent, piercing eyes were burning with a gray light ahead of the entire face,” and the “murderer” prince caught, perhaps, the main reason for which Gregory, presented to the monarch in the fall of 1905, retained his position at court until his death: "Rasputin entered the royal palace as calmly and naturally as he entered his hut in the village of Pokrovskoye."
In the private life of the royal family, he was in reality a familiar, proven psychotherapist who evoked positive emotions in the conditions of the heir's carefully hidden hemophilia - Nicholas II, who was stingy with sensual manifestations, in his diary more than once, after describing meetings with him, even put an exclamation mark. If you had remained a comforter in the private space of the crowned family, there would probably not have been a murderous myth that for years undermined the reputation of the monarchy and ultimately blew it up. But Rasputin could not be hidden from society - already in the spring of 1910 the newspapers trumpeted about the "mystical debauchery" of the Siberian peasant, in 1912 the myth penetrated the walls of the Duma, and rumor began to acquire the outlines familiar from Lenin's quote: where "all the cynicism and debauchery of the royal gang with the monstrous Rasputin at its head. Ilyich conveyed the rumors correctly: the worst enemy of Grigory R. Iliodor, who composed his libel "The Holy Devil" with the assistance of Maxim Gorky, assured that he had succeeded in proving that "Rasputin is a depraved peasant, a dirty trick, lives with Tsarina Alexandra and gave birth to her heir Alexei, and that Rasputin is an unofficial Russian emperor and patriarch of Russia. churches".
And in 1916, demonization took its final form - Grigory R. was declared "the center of German agents", and Pavel Milyukov broadcast about this from the Duma rostrum. The American historian Douglas Smith, who published his biography of Rasputin in 2016, penetrated the German archives, discovered the dossier of the "elder" and made sure that he was definitely not a "Kaiser's agent", but attempts to bribe him with the help of sent from neutral spy countries have failed. But the conspirators attempted to kill the monster that was destroying Russia, and in reality ended up in the monarchy they were defending from it.
Promotional video:
The culmination of the Rasputin legend was the myth of his very death, of an unkillable villain who was not taken by cyanide and who was thrown into the hole alive. In a boring reality, three shots, including a direct hit to the forehead, were enough. Inquisitive Smith also disavowed the version of "purely English murder" popular in the 2000s. Referring to a document from the State Archives of the Russian Federation, he claims that the British Webley-455 revolver, from which Rasputin was fired, was issued to one of the officers of the Petrograd security department who followed him.
… And yet, in the main, Gregory R. turned out to be a seer. He did not predict his own death, but correctly portrayed the breakthrough power of 1917 back in August 1915, staging a public spree, rare in his biography, on the Tovarpar steamer en route from Tyumen to his native Pokrovskoye. The Swedish citizen, composer and ethnographer Julius Napoleon Garteveld testified that “Rasputin brought into the 1st class cabin 15 private soldiers who were traveling with them on a steamer. He sat them down at a common table d'hôte and demanded that they sing songs to him. At the same time, he told the soldiers that he was “given such power from Petrograd," thus wishing to induce the timid ones to enter the first class. " After a year and a half, there will be no more timid soldiers in Russia, they will begin to determine the fate of that very government from Petrograd.