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In his own words

Echoes of Rasputin: faith healing

Was Rasputin evil?

It is all too easy to categorise Rasputin as evil. He certainly looks the part: saturnine, deep-browed, and with eyes that were described by many witnesses as hypnotic, feral or strangely luminous. He shares with Count Dracula the distinction of having been played by Christopher Lee in a Hammer horror film. Socially, he is known to have been a womanising drunkard; politically, he is remembered as a meddler, and a symbol of corruption in the highest circles. The evidence for his satanic nature appears at first to be overwhelming.

Devout or devious?

Yet Rasputin is a far more complex figure than he appears. He was, at every stage, a devoutly religious man. The nature of his faith was quite extraordinary, and closer to that of the old Siberian shamans than to the passive belief of the general populace. He believed that he had a powerful and intimate connection with God, which manifested itself in his ability to heal, and that this connection had to be maintained through certain ritual acts. The secret, possibly inherited from the ecstatic khlysty cult, was that sin could be used to drive out sin. Evil, rather than being an end in itself, becomes the dark loam in which a stronger virtue grows.

Knowing this, we can see the supposedly evil man in a new light. Rasputin's indulgences were not those of the dissipated or the perverse, but deliberate spiritual strategies which kept him close to God – at least, while he had the strength to maintain them. However questionable this approach may be on theological grounds, it gave him tremendous inner strength. (It is the path of the would-be Christ in the flesh, contrasted with that of the mere believer.) One who is in the habit of challenging Satan on his own turf is hardly likely to be intimidated by any earthly power, or impressed by any material show of splendour. It was because of this that Rasputin was able to treat the wealthy gentry of St Petersburg with utter and convincing disdain, castigating them for their sins and vanity. They were impressed.

Healer or charlatan?

Many dispute the existence of such supernatural healing powers as Rasputin was alleged to possess, but it is hard to dismiss the question altogether, given that it was the fact of his healing of the young Tsarevitch Aleksei which secured him in the confidence of the Tsar and Tsarina. The theories associated with the development of such abilities are arcane, but it is worth noting that miracle-workers in various different cultures are often as extreme as Rasputin was in their acts of worship, setting up a deliberate conflict between the flesh and the spirit in order that the spirit can become exceptionally strong. This is a basic tenet of magic.

Whatever the origin of this alleged power may have been, it served for a while as an incontestable proof to the Tsar and Tsarina that Rasputin was on the side of God. How else could he heal, if God were not with him? Unfortunately for Rasputin's public reputation, the miraculous healing of the Tsarevitch was not common knowledge, for the simple reason that Aleksei's haemophilia was itself kept secret. It would not have done for the world to have found out about the potentially fatal weakness of the sole heir to the Russian throne.

Debauched or maligned?

Rasputin's reputation as a healer did spread, however, but not all authorities took this as evidence of his godliness. The monk Illiodor and Bishop Hermogen took quite the reverse view. Knowing of his unorthodox ways and rampant debaucheries, they named the source of his healing power as Satan, not God; he was therefore doing evil, radiating evil, no matter how much he pleaded that he was doing God's work.

But the blame for the downfall of the Russian autocracy in 1917 lies as much with the weakness of the Tsar and Tsarina as it does with Rasputin; and again, the core of the disaster is not that anyone was evil, but that everyone wanted to be godly. Rasputin tried to preserve his own holiness by the drastic challenge of 'using sin to drive out sin', whereas the Tsar and Tsarina were desperate for heavenly guidance, and in Rasputin found an ambassador from the old Holy Russia, a common man who was holy in an earthy and primitive way.

The combination was disastrous. The Tsar needed an urban God, a God of Divine Right, of cathedrals and prayers and appointed social order – and above all else, of stability – but Rasputin's God was an older one. His God arose from a primeval energy which he had sought in his long wanderings in the woods, and which was all about conflict – the war between the spirit and the flesh.

Power mad or God-struck?

The disaster worsened during the First World War, when the Tsar was at the front, and the Tsarina remained behind with Rasputin to help her run the country – unofficially, of course. This left him with a vast amount of executive power, but without any competence in statecraft. All that the two of them could do was to try to work according to what God wanted; ministers were either on their side or not, this or that person was part of God's plan for the country or they weren't. It was the mentality associated with the most primitive, superstitious kinds of religion – good or evil, saved or damned, with us or against us. This naiveté might be forgivable in a peasant, whose world may be divided up in just such simple ways, but in a ruler it is a recipe for catastrophe, as it proved to be in the Tsarina's case.

Antichrist or out of place?

Rasputin was thus not an evil man, but a man out of his proper place – a follower of an old rural God in a city which followed a civilised God. There had been holy fools before, and saintly men who lived in the forests and stank like goats, who were reputed to have worked miracles; but such people stayed in the forests and distant hamlets where they belonged. Rasputin tried to keep this hermit life going in the heart of the city, and the city's corruption and constant temptations shaped for him a stronger Satan than he could repel.

In taking this view of him, we are more forgiving than he was to himself. Rasputin believed in evil, and though he never consciously identified with it, towards the end of his life he feared that he had succumbed to it. He feared that he had become an Antichrist. Rasputin saw his life as a struggle between two opposing forces with no middle ground at all, so if he had failed to live as a saint... well, what else could he be but a devil?

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