Narrative history is Antony Beevor’s great strength. Stalingrad, a landmark study of the Second World War’s bloodiest battle, revealed his talent for capturing a historical catastrophe in deeply human terms. It is this skill we see again in Rasputin and The Downfall of the Romanovs.
The work is not a biography of Grigori Rasputin so much as an investigation into the process of myth-making around the dizzying rise of this Siberian peasant to the position of a spiritual guru who developed an extraordinary relationship with the Russian imperial family. A relationship that led to rumours of debauchery with Empress Alexandra. This, the fake news of its time, contributed to the collapse of the world’s greatest autocracy.
In his introduction, Beevor writes, “Seldom has the cause-and-effect chain of history been so influenced by a single man of humble origins and by wild rumours. Rasputin’s importance provides an intriguingly different angle on the so-called great man theory of history.”
The book’s drawback is a surplus of gossip and rumour. Paradoxically, this is its greatest strength too in bringing alive a society that lost faith in its institutions, surrendered to fragmentation and political drift
The premise Beevor establishes is “that rumour and conspiracy theories can produce even more powerful effects than reality.” For this, he deliberately chooses an impressionistic style, creating the setting and atmosphere by quoting from court gossip, anecdotes, memoirs and diary entries. Though the tone slants towards sensationalism, it reconstructs the social and psychological zeitgeist—the sense of unreality—that haunted the Romanov court in its final decades. For instance, “When, early in 1868, the Dowager Empress was pregnant with her firstborn, the future Tsar Nicholas II, she is said to have been traumatised by a prediction or a dream. She was terrified that her son would be killed by a Russian peasant, a moujik.” Thirty-eight years later, when she heard that “her son and daughter-in-law had become besotted with a peasant called Rasputin, she was horrified. Within the Romanov family, she led the opposition to his influence in the court.” This anecdote surfaces repeatedly throughout the book, deepening in its oracular quality as the narrative slow-marches towards collapse.
For all the scandals associated with Rasputin, Beevor’s portrayal of him is grounded. He is presented as an ordinary, semi-literate peasant. Coarse in speech, his charisma was shaped by the religious culture of rural Russia. A spiritual transformation made him a wandering pilgrim, a strannik. “Stranniki were typically nineteenth-century Russian pilgrims in the sense that they had no particular goal: they moved from one monastery or holy place to another across the vast land mass in their search of God and understanding. There were hundreds of thousands of them, perhaps even a million.” Rasputin’s spirituality, combined with his even deeper sensuality, made him “fixated on women.” There was a belief that one could get close to God only through remorse—“to be saved you had to sin to achieve sincere repentance”—that became the basis of Rasputin’s seduction technique.
From Rasputin’s rural origins, Beevor turns to the stultifying atmosphere of the imperial court, where Nicholas, a small-built man, was towered over by his father, Tsar Alexander III, literally and metaphorically. The father had been driven to repress revolutionaries because they had assassinated his own father, Alexander II, who had emancipated Russia’s serfs and sought to introduce reforms that would preserve the monarchy as an institution. Thus, the seeds of distrust between the sovereign and his people were already present. As heir apparent, Nicholas’s lack of self-confidence foreshadowed the “disastrous mix of obstinacy and indecision” that became a hallmark of his reign. A reign that began with tragedy: On Nicholas’s coronation, there was a stampede that killed over 2,000 people. That evening, misled about the scale of the tragedy, the Tsar and his newly-wedded wife, Alexandra, attended a ball. Beevor writes, “He was dubbed ‘Nicholas the Bloody’ before his reign had scarcely begun.”
Optics mattered. “The Romanov priority was display.” As Empress of All Russias, when Alexandra visited England, her grandmother, Queen Victoria, who had brought her up, seeing her display “some stupendous Romanov jewels”, murmured, “Now Alix, don’t get too proud.” Haughtiness coupled with an insistence on such formalities as “married ladies should always kiss her hand” ensured Alexandra’s unpopularity. In private, however, the desperation to bear a son after four daughters plagued the Tsaritsa. Her anxiety deepened with the birth of a boy, Alexei, who was born with a genetic illness, haemophilia, that caused sudden and potentially fatal bleeding repeatedly. The imperial family were terrified that if Alexei were to die, the dynasty would collapse. His illness thus became one of the biggest state secrets of that era.
Beevor shows how, in Nicholas, this fear, coupled with an innately weak temperament and a profound disinterest in politics, took the form of fatalism. He became increasingly helpless and thus susceptible to his domineering wife’s beliefs. Meanwhile, Alexandra responded to her son’s illness with a desperate religiosity. It was this atmosphere that created the conditions for Rasputin’s entry into the life of the imperial family, for his extraordinary influence at court.
The book’s drawback is a surplus of gossip and rumour. Paradoxically, this is its greatest strength too in bringing alive a society that lost faith in its institutions, surrendered to fragmentation and political drift. There is also a warning relevant to our times. That even if rumours are obviously scurrilous, the mere fact that they get circulated and re-circulated suggests a toxic political climate which can be almost as devastating as if they were true.