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: