The Rasputin File Read Online Free PDF

witnesses, then from the first day of the war the tsar and tsarina begin to speak of those relations themselves. Althoughone other source did help me to comment on their letters: Olga, the younger sister of Nicholas II.
    The Last Of The Ruling Family
    The rare journalists who visited her in those years found it hard to believe that the owner of the little house hidden away in Canada, the short woman dressed in an old-fashioned black skirt, a torn sweater, and sturdy brown shoes, had once owned palaces and been waited upon by dozens of servants. She survived until 1960 and thus also managed to pass the century’s midpoint. Her funeral at the Orthodox Cathedral in Toronto brought together the remnants of the first Russian emigration. Although her tiny rooms did contain some old furniture, the only thing that really recalled the past was the enormous portrait of Alexander III over the fireplace.
    Olga, Nicholas’s sister, and the youngest daughter of Alexander III, was the last surviving member of his large family. Her memory had been remarkable right up to her death and had amazed the journalist who transcribed her memoirs. And in preparing for the show on Rasputin, I used those memoirs that she had dictated to the insistent journalist — yet another voice from the forever-vanished Winter Palace court.
    Rasputin’s Resurrection In The New Russia
    But at the time I still had not found the File. On the other hand, the 1990s saw the emergence from oblivion of documents concerning Rasputin in the Tobolsk and Tyumen archives. Located there are the birth registers of the Church of the Mother of God, on the basis of which it has at last become possible to establish the precise date of Rasputin’s birth. Contained in the Tyumen archive, as well, are the ‘File of the Tobolsk Ecclesiastical Consistory in Regard to Grigory Rasputin’s Affiliation with the Khlysty’ , which had been thought lost, and the ‘File Regarding the Attempt on Grigory Rasputin’s Life’.
    I am grateful to both archives, which considerately provided me with photocopies of the precious Rasputin documents in their possession.
    Grigory Rasputin has of late begun to enjoy something of a resurrection in Russia, and he has even become an essential part of a revived national or,more accurately, nationalistic ideology. Here in truth is another of history’s jests: the man whom Russian monarchists saw as the destroyer of autocracy has become the standard-bearer of the new autocratic ideas.
    In fact, the man himself — or, more precisely, his writings — has played no small part in his resurrection. After perestroika , his writings again became available, producing a tremendous impression. In a country where ignorance of the Bible was universal, his forgotten Biblical sayings and muscular language of the people were bewitching.
    The new interest in Rasputin derives from a justified sense that the image of him created over the last century is little more than a political legend. That the testimony published by Schyogolev in his Proceedings of the Extraordinary Commission was essentially the testimony of Rasputin’s enemies. And that there are many inconsistencies.
    But all that the new research has yielded is a political legend turned on its head. The ‘holy devil’ Grigory has become the holy elder Grigory. Russian myths about devils and saints — how many there have been this century! Bloody Nicholas II and then Nicholas the saint, the father and teacher Stalin and then the bloody monster Stalin, the saintly Lenin and then the bloody Lenin. The culmination of all the recent research on Rasputin is the nationalists’ favourite tale about the evil ‘Yid-Masons’. ‘It was, in essence, the Masons who created the Rasputin myth, a myth having as its goal the blackening and discrediting of Russia and its spiritual principle’ (Oleg Platonov, Russia’s Crown of Thorns) .
    History loves to jest. The fact is that before the revolution and immediately after it