Russia After Rasputin

checking in on the sixes

One legend about Rasputin is that he supposedly told the tsar that when he (Rasputin) died, Nicholas would not have long to live. This prophecy was more or less fulfilled. Rasputin died in December 1916, and a year and a half later the entire royal family was killed. If Rasputin’s murder was intended to save Russia, it did not exactly work.

By December 1926, one decade later, neither Grishka nor his royal patrons would have recognized the country. The First World War – which Rasputin tried and failed to dissuade the tsar from joining – was over, as was the brutal civil war that came in the aftermath of world war and revolution. Lenin was dead and the country was in the throes of a ruthless power struggle.

Looking back, the “ministerial leapfrog”* of the empire’s final years, or the appointments of Rasputin’s protégés to government posts now looked like child’s play compared with Stalin’s steady march toward dictatorship after he out-maneuvered Trotsky and slowly but surely put his loyalists in charge of the secret police, the army, and the party. It would take more than a year before the opposition was utterly defeated, but by late 1926 its back had been broken, even if Trotsky, Kamenev, and Zinoviev did not yet fully realize it.

Hurray! On December 5, 1936, the long-awaited constitution – the sort of constitution that members of the prerevolutionary State Duma could only dream of – was finally enacted. Now everyone in the country enjoyed equal rights – there would be no more lishentsy, people deprived of the right to vote because they came from the exploiting class. The new constitution proclaimed wonderful democratic freedoms and did not contain a single word about the dictatorship of the proletariat. Admittedly, it also did not contain any words about private property, for the simple reason that none was left in the country. All the landowners and entrepreneurs were also gone. Society was divided into the working class, the toiling peasantry, and Soviet sluzhashchie – literally “servers,” but used for anyone helping to built the Soviet state through something other than physical labor, be they engineers, secretaries, soldiers (voennosluzhashchie) or sales clerks. There was also the intelligentsia, a pitiable and browbeaten social stratum that was supposed to follow the working class. Lucky them! Who wouldn’t want to follow the working class and toiling peasantry?

Soon, the job of building socialism would be complete, although for now, the class war was only intensifying and every day new members of the working class, peasantry, intelligentsia, clergy, and even the supposedly extinct landowning and entrepreneurial classes were being sent to “places not too remote,” or, to use another euphemism for labor camps, to “where they dance and sing.” In 1933 Rasputin’s own son had died in such a place, a camp in frigid Norilsk. His widow had died in exile in 1932, and his daughter Varvara had one year left to live.

In December 1946, A year and a half had passed since the end of the World War, not the one that Grishka Rasputin wanted to avoid, but the other, the Second one. And just as they did after the end of the First World War, people thought that the defeat of the Fascists would allow an entirely new life to begin. Nicholas, Alexandra, and Grishka Rasputin had receded into the distant past. Nobody remembered them but some musty old historians.

Alas, none of the marvelous changes people expected came to be. Kolkhozes were not shut down, the friendship with America that had developed during the wartime alliance came to an abrupt end, and rather than emptying out, the labor camps were being filled with anyone who had committed the height of treachery by permitting himself to be captured and interred in a Nazi camp, along with those who simply were a bit too free with their tongues about what they had seen in Western Europe.

While victory had elevated Stalin to new heights of international prestige, in December the country was entering into a postwar famine that wound up killing an estimated 1.5 million people. Furthermore, guerilla wars had broken out in western Ukraine and the Baltic states. Stalin quickly made it clear that he had no intention of repaying Soviet citizens with greater freedoms as a reward for their wartime sacrifices.

In 1956, December was once again a time of hope. After Khrushchev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalinism in February, things were sure to improve. Now that the truth had come out, the socialist idea could be realized in uncorrupted form and the country would flourish. Of course, the crushing of the Hungarian uprising the previous month and the Suez Crisis that unfolded in parallel looked like setbacks, but the “Generation of the 20th Congress” persisted in looking toward the future with optimism.

By 1966, the atmosphere of hope of ten years earlier had vanished. Khrushchev’s Thaw was over and the dour, faceless secret policemen had taken over. The writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel had been in the camps for almost a year, and the human rights movement that had largely started as a drive to collect signatures on their behalf was now gaining momentum – as was the crackdown against dissent.

Rasputin’s murderer, Felix Yusupov, still had one year to live. He and his wife Irina had emigrated to Paris. It was actually Irina who had been used to lure Rasputin to the Yusupov Palace, the site of the murder, “to get to know her better” 50 years earlier. The Yusupovs were not poor, but they were hardly wealthy, having long since burned through the family fortune. In 1932 they had managed to get £25,000 out of a lawsuit against the makers of the movie Rasputin and the Empress, which falsely portrayed Irina Yusupova as Rasputin’s lover. This money was long gone by 1966.

It was around this time that the name Alexander Solzhenitsyn started to crop up with increasing frequency in Moscow. Abandoning his habit of remaining silent as he focused on his writing, he began to accept every invitation he was given to read excerpts from his novels The First Circle and Cancer Ward, neither of which had been passed by the censors. The seed that would many years later flower into The Red Wheel, a cycle of novels chronicling Russian history that described the royal family and Alexandra’s desperation after Rasputin’s death, was only just beginning to germinate in the author’s mind.

This is also when Elem Klimov began his many-year fight for the right to make a film about Rasputin based on a screenplay by Semyon Lungin and Ilya Nusinov.

After another ten years, in 1976, The regime was growing increasingly decrepit and rotten. Doddering Brezhnev was happy to receive the shiny trinkets he kept being awarded, barely able to comprehend what these medals and honors signified.

After much torment and delay, a film about Rasputin had finally been completed in the Soviet Union. Back in 1966, Lungin and Nusinov had been able to get approval for their application to produce The Holy Elder Grishka Rasputin, although the subject matter was deemed to be of little interest to anyone. Soon the screenplay was written – and then heavily cut after complaints that it glorified Rasputin and was too preoccupied with life’s racier aspects. One year later another screenplay, now with the title Agony, was written. After ten days of shooting, production was halted. The agony in question was the death throes of the tsarist regime, but perhaps something else was also being hinted at? But then in 1971 Hollywood released Nicholas and Alexandra and this somehow worked in Klimov’s favor. The slanders coming out of Hollywood had to be countered! Agony went back into production with the magnificent Alexei Petrenko in the role of Rasputin. The only problem was that Soviet audiences were not allowed to see the film. After endless hurdles and endless tweaks, Agony was finally sent abroad.

Solzhenitsyn by now had been in emigration for a couple of years and was continuing his work on The Red Wheel, gathering materials to describe the events that he considered “knots” – pivotal moments in Russian history. One such knot was October 1916.

By the end of 1986, perestroika had been transforming the country for almost two years; hope for a brighter future had returned. Agony was now being shown to Soviet moviegoers, and Gorbachev and Reagan had just met in Reykjavik – signs of a new era.

On December 23, the renowned physicist and human rights activist Andrei Sakharov returned to Moscow from exile. On the other hand, before he arrived, on December 8, another famous defender of human rights, Anatoly Marchenko, died in prison in Chistopol after a 117-day hunger strike. His death was barely noticed amid the general rejoicing and renewed optimism.

History’s “blank spots” were beginning to be filled in, episodes that could not be mentioned in the past were now generating great interest: the 1930s, Stalinist repressions, the Civil War, the revolution, as well as the years leading up to the revolution. And Rasputin. All these topics were being given a fresh look.

In 1996, the Soviet Union was gone, and Russia had emerged. Gorbachev was long forgotten, and Yeltsin, so popular just a few years earlier, was now losing support. The country had been stunned by Russia’s failures and thousands of casualties in the First Chechen War. The country was painfully reacquainted with the long forgotten word “terrorist.”

The presidential elections that took place in May and June of that year had handed Yeltsin a victory, but only thanks to dazzling PR and media campaigns. The president was in frail health and had to undergo open-heart surgery immediately after the elections. On the bright side, Yegor Gaidar’s economic reforms were beginning to bear fruit, and furthermore the price of oil was going up. Life in the country began to slowly improve. Meanwhile, in the St. Petersburg mayor’s office a KGB lieutenant colonel in reserve named Vladimir Putin was engaged in activities known to only a small circle.

Just as it had seemed in 1916 that the Russian monarchy would last forever, it is always hard to believe that dictators will ever lose their iron grip. Nevertheless, December 2006 saw a number of them fade into the sunset. One was Augusto Pinochet – a man lionized by some as Chile’s savior, and despised by others as a brutal executioner.

In Russia, a number of economists and political scientists around the turn of the century had been fascinated by Pinochet. It seemed to them that a strongman like Pinochet might deliver their country from crisis. In 2000, some thought that Putin could be that strongman. By 2006 some of them had changed their minds.

The president of Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, also died in December, as did Saddam Hussein. Even tyrants are not immortal.

Rasputin’s true story might not have sold so well, but by 2006 sensational versions based on legend rather than fact could be picked up in paperback, complete with accounts of orgies and descriptions of Grishka’s ties to Freemasons and his diabolical desire to destroy Russia.

In 2016, a century has passed since Russia rushed headlong into catastrophe. Back then, Rasputin seemed the embodiment of everything rotten and sinister plaguing Russia, but his murder changed nothing. Two months later, the monarchy fell; a few months after that the Bolsheviks came to power.

What awaits us in 2017? The predictions are gloomy, but we can always hope.

* Министерская чехарда is a term apparently coined by rightist Duma member Vladimir Purishkevich for the endless shuffling of personnel in Nicholas’ cabinet that prevented anything productive from getting done.