Rasputin

The bond that made Rasputin's career was not with the emperor but with the empress, and its cause was a single medical fact. The heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei, born in 1904, suffered from hemophilia — a disorder in which the blood does not clot, so that a minor injury or internal bleed could become life-threatening. The condition was kept a state secret. It ran through the descendants of Queen Victoria, Alexandra's grandmother, and it turned every childhood bruise into a potential death sentence. The most modern medicine of the age could do essentially nothing.

Into that desperation walked Rasputin. On more than one occasion, when Alexei was in crisis and the doctors had given up, Rasputin was summoned — sometimes present, sometimes sending word by telegram — and the bleeding subsided. Whether he calmed the boy, whether his insistence on keeping doctors and their aspirin away happened to help, or whether the episodes simply ran their course, the effect on Alexandra was total. She became convinced that this peasant was the one man on earth who could keep her son alive, and that his presence was a sign of God's protection over the dynasty. For a devout, isolated mother watching her only son suffer, no argument could touch that conviction.

By the years of the First World War, the Rasputin of rumor had almost nothing to do with the man from Pokrovskoye. He was said to be the empress's lover, the true ruler of Russia, the hand that appointed and dismissed ministers, a German agent, a satanic force draining the life of the nation. Cartoons showed him looming over tiny puppet-figures of the tsar and tsarina. The stories about his private life — the drinking, the women, the debauched nights — mixed real indiscretion with wild invention, and no one bothered to sort one from the other.

There was a kernel of fact. Rasputin did drink, did surround himself with admiring women, did enjoy the access and money his position brought, and did offer opinions on appointments that the empress sometimes relayed. But Sumpf shows the distance between that and the omnipotent schemer of the myth. Rasputin had no coherent political program, no faction, no real grasp of statecraft. His interventions were erratic and often ignored. He was a court favorite in an age that no longer knew what to do with court favorites — not a shadow government.

Step back from the séances and the poisoned cakes, and Rasputin stops being a cause of the Romanovs' fall and becomes a symptom of it. The truly telling fact is not that a Siberian peasant reached the heart of the empire, but that the empire had grown so closed, so cut off from the country it ruled, that a single man could come to seem like its master. Sumpf uses Rasputin as a lens, and what the lens brings into focus is the isolation of Nicholas and Alexandra in their final years.

The court that clung to Rasputin was a court that had stopped listening to almost everyone else. Nicholas distrusted his ministers, his relatives, the Duma, and much of educated society; Alexandra distrusted them more. Their world had shrunk to the palace, the sick child, and the handful of people they believed God had sent. In that vacuum a holy man's word could outweigh a minister's, not because he was powerful but because the alternative voices had all been shut out. Rasputin did not break the machinery of the monarchy. He filled a silence that the monarchy had created around itself.

Rasputin was pulled from the Neva a few days after his murder, and the autopsy told a plainer story than the legend that was already circulating: he had been shot, and he had drowned. No unkillable monster, no poison that bounced off him — just a badly beaten body under the ice. The man who died there was a peasant mystic who had wandered into a court desperate for a miracle and stayed because, for one sick boy, he seemed to be one. The rest was written by people who needed him to be larger.