Barshad - No one man should have all that power: how Rasputins manipulate the world

Copyright 2019 Amos Barshad

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ISBN: 978-1-4197-3455-7
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To Ima, Aba, Marush, Rodi, and Allison

Lord Henry: There is no such thing as a good influence, Mr. Gray. All influence is immoralimmoral from the scientific point of view. Because to influence a person is to give him ones own soul.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

As far back as I can remember, Ive been obsessed with control. Not the beneficent kindnot the kind exhibited by the truly motivational, the organically wise, the honestly magnetic. That kind is easy enough to understand. And if anything, our histories and cultures give too much credence to that archetype. It was always dark control that grabbed me. Maybe I say that due to some predilection for the unseemly. But I dont think so. Ask yourself whos a more compelling figurethe head of state, or the senior advisor yanking their puppet strings?

Thats the classic format of untoward control: the elected public official and their shadowy right-hand operator. Thats why Grigori Rasputin is our gold standard. He is the most famous behind-the-scenes operator in history. And Ive been obsessed with him for just about forever, too.

The tale of Rasputin will always be more myth than fact, which is what makes it so seductive. What we know for sure is this: Once, to the horror and amazement of a generation, a long-haired peasant magicked his way into the uppermost echelon of Russian high society.

When he died in St. Petersburg in 1916, he did so as the most notorious man in the Russian Empire. Cause of death: a revolver shot to the forehead. Or a revolver shot to the heart. Or potassium cyanidelaced fortified wine and petit-fours. Or drowning. Or all four. Or none.

Rasputins relationship with Nicholas II and Alexandra, the last tsar and tsarina of Russia, was odd, intimate, heartfelt, and feared. The royal couple trusted him, in part, because of his mysterious ability to provide physical succor to their frail young son, Alexei, a hemophiliac. From there Rasputin became something between a court favorite, a personal priest, a guardian angel, and a best friend. Remember how last year all were against us and our Friend gave you the help and strength, the tsarina once wrote to the tsar, with existential flair. You took over all & saved Russia.

And thats what got Rasputin offed. The conspirators who carried out his infamously botched assassination believed they were rescuing the Russian Empire. Rasputin had become too powerful, and he had to die.

Rasputin healed the weak. And he fucked and drank with aplomb. To some, he was a God-man. To others, a depraved deviant.

The writer Nadezhda Lokhvitskaya, who published under the name Teffi, would have brief but dramatic encounters with Rasputin in turn-of-the-century St. Petersburg. Years later, she recalled the mania that surrounded him. At dinner parties, Teffi noted, hosts pleaded with guests to please, please discuss anything but the Mad Monk. A common sign decorated homes: In this house we do not talk about Rasputin. She also passed along the infamous story of the black automobile, an unsolved case in which a car sped through St. Petersburg over the course of several nights, firing shots from inside and wounding bystanders.

Its Rasputins doing, people were saying. Who else?

Whats he got to do with it?

He profits from everything black, evil and incomprehensible.

Everything that sows discord and panic. And theres nothing he cant explain to his own advantage when he needs to.

In death, he became legend. Mere hours after the fatal incident, the myth was blooming. According to police reports, when Rasputins body was discovered in the Neva, locals ran to the river to scoop up water that had touched the corpsethey wanted to capture some essence of the great man.

After his death, all biographical details took on the air of more. One alleged night in Moscows Yar restaurant, drunk as all hell and hitting on all of the dancers, he was said to have flashed what would come to be known around the world as a stunningly prodigious penis. In the years after his death, a group of female Russian expats in Paris allegedly possessed the penis, kept in a wooden casket, and prayed to it as a holy icon. It was described in one memoir as a blackened overripe banana about a foot long, resting on velvet cloth. As I write this, the Museum of Russian Erotica claims to have the original artifact, pickled for preservation.

Is any of it real? Then, as now, it was hard to say.

His name reverberates. He sinned and repented. He said he was a man of faith and he meant it, every word of it, even while doing all of these disreputable things. He had, effectively, groupies. And he had long hair and eccentric clothing and a command of any room. He was some kind of strange, strange star.

The whole world reads books which are written in blood, and yet remains indifferent. Humanity of today is blind to everything save the small concerns of the moment, petty personal interests and the thirst for immediate success. That was written by Prince Yusupof, the man who murdered Rasputin. Is not this also a form of Rasputinism, which has gained possession of our epoch, and of the whole of mankind to-day?

Yusupof was writing from Paris as a free man, a decade after the black deed was done, in an unseemly attempt to justify the cold-blooded assassination. But the murderous prince was right, in his way. We are obsessed with what is directly in front of us. Right now, right this minute, we ask: Who holds power, and how did they get it?

And while Yusupof may have meant something quite different by the term he was coining, the prince was right on this, too: Rasputinism has taken over. More than a hundred years after his death, Rasputin has fully become a symbolan archetype, recognized all over the world. Wherever there is a puppet master, an minence grise, a Svengali, a manipulator, a secret controllerthat is a Rasputin.

Traditionally Rasputins have been understood to be shadow leaders, the ones with true, evil power. But the odd truth is that the natural habitat of a Rasputin is not only the high-stakes salons, the war rooms, the places where geopolitical waves are made. Not at all. The truth is, wherever power dynamics existfrom Congress to Hollywood to the break room at the Tommys Pretzel Huta Rasputin can rise. It happens all of the time.

When I sat down to write this book, I realized that even through my many years as a culture reporter for Grantland, The FADER, and New York magazine, Id been exploring this kind of control. Look at the chart-topping pop star, and then look at the producer whos breathlessly envisioned their whole career. Look at the world-famous movie star, and then look at the director whos callously manipulated every beat of their performance. Look at the hip-hop genius, and then look at the anonymous MCs he blesses, and curses, with fame.