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Authors: Edvard Radzinsky
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holy fools and elders or to the sectarians. To the cloisters lost in the forests.
The Elders’ Prophecies
Rasputin’s life had passed its halfway mark and was already hurtling towards death. His fourth decade had begun, and he was still going from monastery to monastery.
The faces of the holy images in their ancient frames glimmer before their lamps in the dark refectory. In three rows, extending to the windows stand tables, and on either side of them, benches. Here sit not only the monastery brethren but also the lay people visiting the monastery. A place is found for everyone. What a gallery of faces and types! How many passions overcome or repressed! How many instructive stories! He learned to read pitiable human passions in those faces. He saw the great power of a piety that could help to heal incurable diseases. But he also came to know the Siberian sorcerers and healers, who had brought from the heathen past the secrets oftheir cures and spells. Thousands of faces and encounters, thousands of confessions and conversations into the night.
Under the icon cases are books in old black bindings and a little chalice — a copper cup with a cross on it that serves as a bell during meals. How many times had the wanderer Grigory Rasputin heard its ring signalling the start of a meal. How many times had he gazed with widened eyes at those ordinary-looking monks, the ‘elders’, whose spiritual feats the monastery had hidden from view.
The great elders, those who had achieved moral perfection and gained a wisdom that was unattainable in the world at large, lived in the monastery like the most ordinary monks. The monastery rules did not permit the display of spiritual riches on the outside, and it protected the spiritual growth of its votaries from worldly temptations. But that which was hidden during the day was recorded by night in a trembling elder’s hand. And how happy Grigory was whenever he succeeded in talking to these men. It was from them that he learned his tender, love-filled speech.
In the monasteries he heard about the elders’ prophecies regarding the destruction looming over the Romanov realm. Those predictions are now famous as the prophecies of the elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery and of Serafim of Sarov. But how many other divinations by obscure elders have perished in distant monasteries that were ravaged in the civil war and destroyed by the Bolsheviks? Rasputin brought back from his wanderings that sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom.
The ‘Russian Dream’
At the very beginning of his wanderings among the ancient cloisters hidden in the wilderness, Grigory also learned about a new spiritual experience that had first enticed and then come to rule over hundreds of people, and that had secretly captivated whole monasteries. They were secret fellowships, powerful in the rabid faith of their membership. Whilst other Christian sects came from the West, the Khlysty (Flagellants) and Skoptsy (Castrators) were an exclusively Russian phenomenon. They were sects in which fanaticism, lechery, and faith in God were blasphemously joined together as one. Sects that played a major role in the fate of Rasputin and of the empire.
The downtrodden condition of the people, the cruel oppression of the peasants, and the persecution of their ancestors’ old ways of worship all gave rise to the age-old ‘Russian dream’ of the advent of a Redeemer. At first, the dream was of an earthly Redeemer — a just ruler. And self-proclaimed‘tsars’ accordingly made continual appearances over a two hundred year span in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
There have been pretenders of the kind in every country. But only in Russia did the phenomenon reach such a scale and enjoy such success. The first great impostor, the fugitive monk Grigory Otrepiev, declared himself the son of Ivan the Terrible and, to Europe’s amazement, routed the powerful Tsar Boris Godunov. And himself became the Muscovite
The Elders’ Prophecies
Rasputin’s life had passed its halfway mark and was already hurtling towards death. His fourth decade had begun, and he was still going from monastery to monastery.
The faces of the holy images in their ancient frames glimmer before their lamps in the dark refectory. In three rows, extending to the windows stand tables, and on either side of them, benches. Here sit not only the monastery brethren but also the lay people visiting the monastery. A place is found for everyone. What a gallery of faces and types! How many passions overcome or repressed! How many instructive stories! He learned to read pitiable human passions in those faces. He saw the great power of a piety that could help to heal incurable diseases. But he also came to know the Siberian sorcerers and healers, who had brought from the heathen past the secrets oftheir cures and spells. Thousands of faces and encounters, thousands of confessions and conversations into the night.
Under the icon cases are books in old black bindings and a little chalice — a copper cup with a cross on it that serves as a bell during meals. How many times had the wanderer Grigory Rasputin heard its ring signalling the start of a meal. How many times had he gazed with widened eyes at those ordinary-looking monks, the ‘elders’, whose spiritual feats the monastery had hidden from view.
The great elders, those who had achieved moral perfection and gained a wisdom that was unattainable in the world at large, lived in the monastery like the most ordinary monks. The monastery rules did not permit the display of spiritual riches on the outside, and it protected the spiritual growth of its votaries from worldly temptations. But that which was hidden during the day was recorded by night in a trembling elder’s hand. And how happy Grigory was whenever he succeeded in talking to these men. It was from them that he learned his tender, love-filled speech.
In the monasteries he heard about the elders’ prophecies regarding the destruction looming over the Romanov realm. Those predictions are now famous as the prophecies of the elders of the Optina Pustyn Monastery and of Serafim of Sarov. But how many other divinations by obscure elders have perished in distant monasteries that were ravaged in the civil war and destroyed by the Bolsheviks? Rasputin brought back from his wanderings that sense of catastrophe hanging over the kingdom.
The ‘Russian Dream’
At the very beginning of his wanderings among the ancient cloisters hidden in the wilderness, Grigory also learned about a new spiritual experience that had first enticed and then come to rule over hundreds of people, and that had secretly captivated whole monasteries. They were secret fellowships, powerful in the rabid faith of their membership. Whilst other Christian sects came from the West, the Khlysty (Flagellants) and Skoptsy (Castrators) were an exclusively Russian phenomenon. They were sects in which fanaticism, lechery, and faith in God were blasphemously joined together as one. Sects that played a major role in the fate of Rasputin and of the empire.
The downtrodden condition of the people, the cruel oppression of the peasants, and the persecution of their ancestors’ old ways of worship all gave rise to the age-old ‘Russian dream’ of the advent of a Redeemer. At first, the dream was of an earthly Redeemer — a just ruler. And self-proclaimed‘tsars’ accordingly made continual appearances over a two hundred year span in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
There have been pretenders of the kind in every country. But only in Russia did the phenomenon reach such a scale and enjoy such success. The first great impostor, the fugitive monk Grigory Otrepiev, declared himself the son of Ivan the Terrible and, to Europe’s amazement, routed the powerful Tsar Boris Godunov. And himself became the Muscovite
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