Rasputin

Gregory Efimovich Rasputin is one of the most debated characters of the 20th Century. Thousands have discussed whether Rasputin was a holy man who came to the aide of the royal family or more simply, a cheat who thrived in womanising and in truth, a man who had a debauched sexual appetite. After all the word "Rasputin" in Russian mean "the debauched one". But in the following pages, I will try to explore a better side of Rasputin; I will attempt to give an accurate analysis of Rasputin and let the facts prove who Rasputin was.

On 10 January 1869, in the midst of a harsh winter, Gregory Efimovich Rasputin was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye. Little is known of his background. His father, Efimy, was a farmer of moderate success, married to a wife, Anna, who had already provided him with an older son, Dimitri. Although later enemies were to allege that Rasputin's surname was in fact an insult meaning "debauched" in Russian, it had been the family name for years, derived from the word for a fork in the road. Pokrovskoye perched on the banks of the Tura River in Tobolsk Province; Pokrovskoye was a typical Russian peasant village where few if any were educated and town’s people were religious, narrow minded and fearful.

When Rasputin was eight years old, he suffered his first tragedy. He was playing with his older brother along the banks of the Tura when Dimitri fell and was drowned. Shortly thereafter, Rasputin began to startle his fellow-villagers by making amazing predictions. In one incident, Rasputin correctly identified a horse thief. As a teenager, Rasputin paid a visit to the local Verkhoturye Monastery. Here he encountered not only the Orthodox Church he had known from his childhood but also a number of heretical sects. Principals among these were the Khlysty and the Skopsty. The first group held that only through sin could one truly repent and receive God's grace, while the second believed that if a penitent studied long enough, it was possible to attain a semi-divine nature and escape earthly judgment. When Rasputin returned to Pokrovskoye, he was a changed man: he impressed his fellow villagers with his impressive religious exhortations, spiced up with half-understood bits of doctrine he had picked up at Verkhoturye. Contrary to common belief, the "monk" Rasputin was in...

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...holas had set a path to glory for Nicholas, who himself is man of poor intellect. Tsarevich Nicholas Alexandrovich. At the time of his father's death in late 1894, Nicholas was an inexperienced youth wholly unprepared for the great task destiny had placed on his shoulders. Nicholas II was barely twenty-six years old at the time of his accession. During his son's golden youth, Alexander III did not allow his son Nicholas much participation in affairs of government. It is likely that Alexander III feared that his eldest son was not intellectually capable of handling the inheritance that was rightfully his. Therefore, the father kept postponing the son's introduction in to the daily running of Russia. Not one person, most of all Alexander III, ever imagined that this young and inexperienced Romanov would ascend the throne as early in life as he did. Czar Nicholas II’s mother Czarina Maria-Feodorovna was nortorouis as a mother who did not allow her children to grow. Therefor altering the young Czar’s behaviour to that all would regret. As Leon Trotsky once said:

"His ancestors did not bequeath him one quality which would have made him capable of governing an empire"