The Mad Monk
There is still one missing character in this whole story. Full of drama, mystery and speculation, some say he played one of the largest roles in the unfortunate and disgraceful events that took place in Russia during the first decades of the last century. His name was Grigori Rasputin, once your run of the mill Christian monk from the Russian Orthodox Church. But the simplicity stops there. Even 100 years after he died, there are details about his life and death that remain unanswered. And to this day, his mysterious power makes him an icon of darkness and fear.
He was born in 1869 in Pokróvskoye, a small village in Siberia, and since childhood was believed to have supernatural powers like foresight and mental healing. He got married at 18 and had three children, but he left home suddenly when he was 23. He spent 3 months in a monastery, where he allegedly had a vision of the Virgin Mary, leading him to a life as a Mystic. He then joined a mysterious sect that supposedly held bacchic orgies for sacred purposes, but soon left to become a pilgrim, and then an orthodox religious man again. Though this fickle religious journey his fame spread to the ears of the royal family.
After traveling for two years he finally arrived at St. Petersburg, where his reputation as a holy man with psychic powers grew even larger. Alexandra, the Tsar’s wife, called him to help heal the only heir of the dynasty, Alexy, who had hemophilia since birth. Miraculously, every time Rasputin went to see him, he showed signs of getting better. Many sceptics and critics explain this by claiming he would hypnotize the boy. Everyone in the high society was fascinated by him, but many accused him of evil and immoral practices, due to his past and his aura of secrecy. There was even a circle of noble ladies around him, that appear to have practiced a dogma aiming to achieve divine grace through sins and lust. He was often referred to as the Mad Monk.
The royal family took him in as a friend and a holy man. And with time, he eventually held a lot of political power. When the Tsar Nicholas gave the order to send troops to the WWI front without his consult, he predicted it would fail. The economy began decreasing and some attributed it to the influence of Rasputin over Alexandra. The most accepted story of his death, is that on December 16th 1916, a group of noblemen and politicians invited him to a dinner where they poisoned him with an amount of cyanide enough to kill 5 men. But it didn’t work. He was then shot 4 times and remained alive, so they beat him and wrapped him in a carpet. Then threw him in the Nevka river, where he was found frozen the next day. Prophet, faith healer, psychic, and mystic; Rasputin held enormous influence in the early days of the revolution and was partly responsible for dragging the empire to ruin.
Visit our sources:
http://www.encspb.ru/object/2804023731?lc=en
http://www.omolenko.com/en/rasputin/st-grigori-rasputin-ideas-and-thoughts.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Rasputin
http://www.rasputin-photos.narod.ru/
And watch this intriguing documentary:
“Red Snow, Gold Clouds” thriller by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker
The Revolution of 1917
In the middle of WWI, poverty, hunger and violence forced the people of Russia to desperately seek a solution. Something, anything new. A ghost that had been wandering around Europe for the past few decades was reviving itself. Beginning with the protests in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Consequently, the military joined the people’s indignation and rising, took over the government of the Tsar and installed a provisionary institution instead that was familiar to the Empire before the Tzar: the Duma. All this, happened in February 1917. But the war wasn’t over and food hadn’t come, so people carried on with their demands. Finally the Tsar abdicated, we already know that story. But what happened between the end of the Romanov’s and the great communist State?
Vladimir Lenin came back from Switzerland to take advantage of the confusion and chaos (He had been exiled after the failure of the revolution 12 years before, which ended up in the holocaust of the Bloody Sunday). In April, he declared that all the power should be taken away from the new government and given to the Soviets (the worker’s unions). In order to get there, he had to remove all opposition to the Bolshevik party. Far from answering his demands, the official military lead by Alexander Kerensky, opened another war front deepening the crisis. People started to follow Lenin’s revolutionary rhetoric again, but again their protests were repressed. And, just like before, Lenin managed to run away.
Two months before the democratic elections, protests started once more. And Lenin saw a new opportunity to siege power with the Bolsheviks, so he came back from Finland, where he was exiled. They occupied strategic positions in official buildings and palaces in the middle of an October night. And just like that, they arrested all the ministers and leaders of the provisional government gaining real control over all the people of Russia. They made immediate reforms, took the country out of the war and installed a socialist State which removed all of the opposition parties. Not everyone was very happy with this, instigating a Civil War between the supporters of the former regime and the communists. The book Red Snow, Gold Clouds, which is still at work by Marianna Baker, tells the story of young Lydia Markova; her escape during the Civil War as she journeyed from Moscow to Harbin, China, in 1919.
Sources:
http://www.orlandofiges.info/section6_TheOctoberRevolution1917/index.php
http://www.ditext.com/yarmolinsky/yarframe.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution
Documentary:
The Death of the Dynasty
The Romanovs’ end was the product of the Red Army’s conspiracy after they won the civil war. But the war didn’t come out of nowhere. Workers, peasants and people in general wouldn’t stand the Empire’s decision to spend billions of rubles on two wars (Japan and Europe), while their own population was starving. We already know about the process and the outcome of the civil war so let’s talk about how the new government erased any possibility of the royal and noble peoples regaining power in Russia.
When he realised that he could no longer rule sufficiently and that he, himself, was partly responsible for the crisis and rise of revolution, Nicholas II abdicated in favor of Mikhail, his younger brother. Unfortunately for the Empire, Mikhail also didn’t trust himself, resigning the next day because he decided that the State had to be reformed with the people’s consent before it could be ruled. And that’s how 300 years of Romanov power came to an end. But the royal family knew that the revolutionary army would never accept this as the only thing won, and that there would be other attempts to reclaim the throne. So they tried to escape into exile but did not succeed. They got on a train to go to Tobolsk in August 1917, as advised by the provisional government of Alexander Kerensky, in an attempt to save themselves. Two months later the Bolsheviks had full control of the government.
The family, with 45 of their servants, were practically living imprisoned, eating what they could and wearing regular clothes. And were moved again, in May 1918 to Yekaterinburg, filled with fear of prosecution by trial every single day, waiting for the Czech Legion to come and rescue them. But it was a false hope. One night, commandant Yakov Yurovsky appeared with a group from the military, gathered the whole family in a small room “for their own safety”, took a picture of them, and told them they were sentenced to death by the Ural Soviet. Nicholas Romanov, his wife, Alexandra, their four daughters, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia and his only son, 14-year-old sick Alexei, and four servants were shot dead.
In the year 2000, the members of the family were canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church. But this was not the only tribute. Investigations surrounding the various rumours and suspicions of their deaths’ arose and were eventually taken up by scientists and explorers after the fall of the Soviet Union, 25 five years ago. Mysteries abound in the case of the slain royal family, for instance, Trotsky’s letters and Yurovsky’s reports were found along with the remains of the family’s bodies, among many other treasures. These mysteries have brought all forms of speculation including artistic creation, like the secret story of Anastasia, the youngest daughter of Nicholas, who was believed to have survived to the shooting, and whose story was recreated in a Disney motion picture. Her remains, though, were found in 2007. To this day, there are still people claiming to be descendants of the survivors of the Romanovs relatives, and state that they have rights to the throne.
You can see our sources here:
http://www.angelfire.com/pa/ImperialRussian/news/martyrs.html
http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/nicholas.htm
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,133226,00.html
http://www.alexanderpalace.org/palace/mainpage.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanov_impostors
You might also be interested in this last-minute news about the Romanovs’ past:
https://www.rt.com/news/319835-russia-tsar-exhume-romanov/
And check out the last chapter of the documentary we showed you:
The Lost Dynasty
Three hundred years of family business. Nineteen Emperors and Empresses ruling with elegance, charisma, intrigue and might. Starting with Mikhail, ending with Mikhail. Building palaces and conquering vast lands. Succeeding one after another to govern hunger and cold with hidden gold and huge power, given by the glory of God and the Church. The legacy of the Romanov Dynasty started in mysterious ways and was ended by dark means in the midst of new worlds.
It started in 1613 when Mikhail I, a 16-year-old boy, was elected as Emperor of Russia by an assembly of boyars, a traditional noble class of the time. Mikhail was the son of Feodor Nikitich Romanov (later crowned as Patriarch Filaret), and the grandson of Roman Zakharin-Yuriev, from whom the name came to existence. Mikhail was elected after the death of Ivan IV, the Terrible, who had killed his own son when his wife, Anastasia, was assassinated by the boyars. And Ivan’s youngest son, Feodor, died childless. Thus his brother-in-law, Boris Godunov, was elected as Tsar in 1599 and did everything he could to keep the Romanovs away. This didn’t last long, because a wave of False Dmitriys, one after another, claiming to be Feodor’s children, took him down and restored the Dynasty.
After Mikhail, came his son Alexis I, in 1645, and his grandson Feodor III, in 1676. Feodor died without children, bringing rise to a new conflict between the descent of Alexis and Peter, and his stepbrother and sister Ivan and Sofia. We’re talking about Peter the Great, who started the importation of European influence and colonizing lands in Siberia. He founded the great city of St. Petersburg. (That’s where the name comes from.) He was the first one to call himself Tsar of all Russia. At his death in 1725, the boyars elected his wife, Catherine I, to succeed him, and after her came a few children, nephews and grandchildren who ruled in the new era of Russia continuing the tradition of fashion, magnificent palaces and powerful conquests. Until Catherine II, widow of one of the grandsons of Peter and Catherine I, conspicuously appeared in the throne in 1762. It is said that the nobles and the church forced him to abdicate in her favor.
A series of new conspiracies were formed in order to obtain the throne involving lots of murder. Alexander I, grandson of Catherine, and his brother Nicholas I, finally regained the power for the dynasty in 1825. And then a new Alexander and a new Nicholas came along. As the last one came to power, a whole new world was arising around the globe and Russia was not prepared. Just as Nicholas II was not prepared to be a Tsar. And was not prepared to fight two external wars and one internal civil war, of which we’ve learned already. In the end, all the members of the family were killed by the revolutionary army of the Bolsheviks. Mikhail, Nicholas’ brother, ruled for a few hours before he was banished and also executed, the finale of the Dynasty of the Romanovs, that had finally came to an end.
Visit our sources:
http://www.loc.gov/rr/rarebook/coll/214.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Romanov
There’s also a great series of documentaries about the dynasty:
The Old Believers
When reading ‘Red Snow, Gold Clouds‘ thriller, you will find that some characters seek refuge in places full of hidden mysteries and ancient traditions. One of the most important being a lost temple of Old Believers—a religious sect who, despite the odds, still live in places that are completely isolated from any external contact or technological innovation. There are some families who never heard about the war except for a few distant explosions and sporadic aircraft flights.
This is the case of Agafia Lykova, an Old Believer who survived isolation for more than 70 years after her father took her, along with her mother and siblings, to the cold Siberian Taiga fleeing from war and persecution. After her mother starved to death to feed the family and after her brothers and father were killed by viruses that an unexpected scouting party brought, Agafia was completely alone. And she survived. The tools she had and the strong work habits she learned from her father were enough to feed herself along with the company of just a few pets. Besides that: she had her faith.
So who are the Old Believers? Their history dates back to the mid-seventeenth century. In the year 1666, the Moscow Patriarch Nikon introduced a series of reforms to the dogma of the Orthodox Church in order to reduce the differences with the Greek tradition, seeking to unify faith with the old times. We now know that Nikon’s ideas were not that correct and actually contrary to what he wanted because it increased the differences and created new gaps within his own people. Old Believers are those who kept the original faith from before the reforms took place.
The differences between one tradition and the other would seem trivial today, but for people like Agafia, they mean everything. Using two fingers instead of three for the sign of the cross, or seven proshpora instead of five for the liturgy, constitute the essence of one ritual or another and in everyday religious details make a difference. God’s help is achieved with honesty and integrity. The Old Believers had been persecuted and killed for centuries for not adhering to official dogma and for not having the power to do something about it.
If you want to learn more about the Old Believers, you can visit these sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Believers
http://library.uoregon.edu/ec/oldbelievers/index.html
You can also watch this great documentary about Agafia:
The Treasure Train
The missing gold is a permanent mystery. That is what it has been during the last century, ever since its disappearance in August 1919. It could be in a monastery, hidden in caves, buried in a forest on the outskirts of a town, in the cellars of a bank or buried in containers in the bottom of a lake. Or all at once. In the fictional reconstruction of Red Snow, Gold Clouds, Marianna Baker explores the diverse theories on the gold`s fate. It should be noted that one of the antagonistic characters in the story, Zharkov, works for the Bank of Kazan, in which part of the official story occurs. Though also, the protagonist`s grandmother sought refuge with the gold in an Old Believer monestary in the Taiga, Siberia. And Zharkov`s wife died in Lake Baikal. Which clue will lead us to the gold?
After the Admiral Kolchak was commissioned by the White Army to hide the gold, he engaged the services of the Czechoslovak Legion to help him in this mission. The particular objective of the legion was to protect the Trans Siberian Train from possible Bolshevik attacks on its journey between Kazan and Irkutsk. However, the Legionnaires` lack of interest of in a foreign war led to an attempt to get some of the treasure for themselves. Thus, in one of the stops at the Kutin station, the Czechs signed an agreement with the Bolshevik army to deliver Kolchak in exchange for a share of the gold (representing in fact, more than half), resulting in his execution.
Plus, on a previous stop in Omsk, one of the wagons had already been robbed by unknown hands, who broke the seals of the train, emptied the containers and killed some of the officers. Through the discovery of an unsent telegram, it was learned that Lenin gave the order to stop the Czech’s treachery and keep all the gold inside the Russian borders. In the end, the Czechs got away with it, returning to Czechoslovakia where they founded a nationally recognized bank. There are numerous records of these dark deals and their results, which still have impact today. But with time, there have been other findings that suggest the treasure has multiple destinations.
For example, a number of medals belonging to the KGB were found in a private building in the city of Tyumen, with irrefutable records that they belong to the treasure. In addition, they have found the remains of tools connected to the train and its protectors in both caves and under Siberian monasteries. And in 2009 a large batch of containers and train parts were found at the bottom of Lake Baikal. Clearly, the gold found its way into many hands leaving a large collection of treasue maps to be discovered.
The elaboration of this post was based on the following documentary:
Mystery of the Russian Tsar’s Lost Gold
When a crown has held power for centuries, it isn’t hard to believe that it will do anything to protect its wealth and power when warning its own vulnerability. Just in the case the proximity of its defeat is mistaken. The Czar’s lost gold is one of the oldest mysteries in the modern world.
As explained in last post, after the revolution there was a red side and a white side that confronted each other for the control of a nation that was mired in scarcity and uncertainty. The whites were defending the interest of the royal family. It is said that the gold reserve of the Romanovs was one of the largest amongst all European kingdoms. It is also said that they managed to keep it safe from the Red Army, thanks to Admiral Alexander Kolchak, after whom the treasure was renamed. What happened to the gold is the body of the mystery.
Theories and conjectures of all kinds have raised and hundreds of searchers have gone to find the treasure using historical documents and mathematical calculations. Kazan, Omsk, Krasnoyarsk, Lake Baikal and even Beijing and Tokyo, have all been visited by secret, official, and unofficial missions throughout the 20th century. It is probable, however, that each theory has some truth in it and that the gold is distributed in several of these places, scattered along the transiberian railway, which was used as an escape route of the White Army and its resources. It is also possible that the gold had simply been used by the military to supply and fund themselves in the remaining time of the war, which they obviously intended to win. If this is true, the mysterious treasure could have ended up with no pain nor glory in the hands of European Banks and companies that added billionaire interests to the debt.
We can’t be sure of anything. What we do know is that Admiral Kolchak was killed by the reds and that the official record of the gold is missing. Red Snow, Golden Clouds provides a new approach to the query of this mystery, that doesn’t seem to ever die. Our two protagonists Andrew and Katya find the two halfs of a treasure map. Will it lead them to the gold. Will they be able to discover the real fate of the Czar’s lost gold?
If you want to learn more about the lost gold of the Czar you can visit these sources:
http://russiasgreatwar.org/media/international/kolchaks.shtml
And you can also watch this video:
“Red Snow, Gold Clouds” thriller by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker
The Russian Civil War 1918-1922
The plot of the thriller Red Snow, Gold Clouds by Marianna Baker and Anna Baker is based on the diary of Lidia Markov, the great-grandmother of Andrew Bartholomew, the book’s main character. The diary narrates Lidia’s dramatic escape from the Russian Civil War in 1919 to Harbin, China, and tells of Lidia’s tragic love affair with General Baratov and how they and two White Army officers hid seven boxes of the Czar’s Gold in the Siberian taiga. Chapters seven and eight focus on their dramatic journey to a new life. You may want to read a short account of the Russian Civil War to help you better understand the story’s setting.
Two revolutions, two armies, millions of deaths. Russian Civil War can be told in numbers if we’re trying to create a general background, but in this case, the facts are more important.
When the October Revolution of 1917 finally came to an end, giving the victory to the Bolsheviks, (renamed as the Red Army), they had to confront a new difficulty: the inevitable union of all their enemies. The new unified force was known as the great White Army or the White Movement. It was made up of the Czar’s imperial army, the fierce Kozakhs, the Mensheviks and some other left groups defeated in the revolution, and nationalist groups from every territory of the recently extinct empire.
In the wake of the Czar’s assassination and later with the end of the European war; new armies, regional governments, foreign interventions and all kinds of factions started to form in order to continue their own agendas (with the promise of exterminating all the others eventually.) Czarists, liberal republicans, communists, anarchists, Czechs, Ukrainians, Mongols, Allies from other countries, and many others, confronted each other restlessly in what was probably the cruelest and most bloody civil war of the western history.
We’re talking about nearly six years of civil war between November 1917 and June 1923. Historical leaders such as Czar Nicholas II and Alexander Kolchak on the white side (both killed in different moments) and Lenin and Trotsky on the red side (whose implacable strategies would result victorious), headed this long and messy battle for power in the vast territory that would eventually turn into the controversial world power of the Soviet Union. According to some, the final death toll was above three million souls, evaporated between blood and gold, deception and secrecy.
If you want to learn more about the Russian Civil War you can visit these sources:
http://spartacus-educational.com/RUScivilwar.htm
http://www.answers.com/topic/civil-war-of-1917-1922
You can also watch this video: