Rasputin In Russian example essay topic

To What Extent Did Rasputin Cause The Russian Revolution? In order to explore this, one must know about Rasputin - his background, his values and his calling, as well as other factors contributing to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the murders of the Romanovs. I have tried to explore this while keeping focus on each event's relation to 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 destroying all that the Romanovs had worked so hard to build. In fact, the word "Rasputin" in Russian means "the debauched one". However, the facts in this essay speak for themselves. In the winter of 1869 Grigori i Yfimovich Rasputin was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye.

Little is known or accessible of his background. His father, Yfimy, was a farmer, married to Anna. They already had an older son - Dimitri. Although later enemies alleged that Rasputin's surname was 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.

It was a typical Russian peasant village where few if any were educated and the people were heavily religious and narrow minded. 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 drowned. Shortly after this, Rasputin began to startle the villagers by making amazing predictions.

In one incident, Rasputin caught a horse thief. As a teenager, Rasputin paid a visit to the local Monastery, where he encountered not only the Russian Orthodox Church he had known from his childhood but also a number of un-Orthodox sects. They held beliefs like "only through sin could one truly repent and receive God's grace", and "if a person studied long enough, it was possible to attain a semi-divine nature and escape earthly judgment" The discovery of these sects greatly changed Rasputin. He impressed the villagers with religious comments and revelations, made interesting with half-understood pieces of religion he had picked up from the monks. Although the monks influenced him, Rasputin himself was not a monk, but actually married. He had 3 children - a boy Dimitri, who was disabled and two girls - Varvarka and Maria.

One day, while working in the fields, Rasputin claimed to see a vision of the Virgin Mary. According to him, she told him to become a pilgrim. He bid his family farewell and set off on a journey (on foot!) to the monastery at Mount Ethos in Greece - 2000 miles away. When he returned to the village, his religious aura seemed even more impressive. He attracted large crowds when he preached, although his version of the Gospel was particularly un-Orthodox. Rasputin also began to practice what he preached, sleeping with as many of his female disciples as he could.

According to Rasputin this was simply a way to salvation - which is a contradiction to his 'holy' image. He was never able to reconcile his physical desires with his spiritual goals. Shortly after 1900, Rasputin left Pokrovskoye on another pilgrimage to St. Petersburg. Here he attracted much attention among the local Orthodox hierarchy for his seemingly genuine desire for salvation together with his undoubted gift for speaking and persuasion. He left the Imperial capital, before returning in 1905. This time he met Tsar and Tsarina, setting his image in Russian history.

Rasputin was introduced to Nicholas and Alexandra by Grand Duchess Militza on 31 October 1905. Militza was a daughter of the King of Montenegro who had married into the Russian Imperial Family. She was renowned for her interest in spiritualism and the newest holy men who came to St. Petersburg. "Today we met a man of God, Gregory, from Tobolsk Province", the Emperor recorded in his diary. He had no way of knowing how fateful the meeting would be. Rasputin didn't make much of an impression at first.

Nicholas and Alexandra had far more to worry about than him - their only son and heir, Tsarevich Alexei, had inherited haemophilia. Several years after their first meeting with Rasputin, they asked for his prayers during one of their son's crises. Rasputin prayed, and their son, deathly ill and overcome with the devastating effects of the disease, quickly recovered. This was to be a pattern repeated over and over again - Alexei fell ill, Rasputin prayed, Alexei recovered. Confronted with such unquestionable evidence, Nicholas and Alexandra came to believe that God had sent Rasputin to save their only son.

Their dependence on him grew greater every year, as cure after cure built into a seemingly undeniable record of divine intervention. As Rasputin's fame, and, in many cases, infamy, spread across St. Petersburg and the Empire, Russia was left in disbelief. Wild tales of his drunken excesses and orgies kept gossips busy for hours. Rasputin himself loved gossip and stories, and greatly exaggerated his stories dealings with the Romanovs. Although his visits to the palace were infrequent (he usually met the Emperor and Empress at the home of Anna Vyrubova) the public weren't prepared to believe the truth. And, because Alexei's haemophilia was a secret within the Imperial Family, no one understood why Nicholas and Alexandra continued to tolerate the presence of this wild barbarian at Court.

Reports of alcoholism and womanising spread and distorted, and the people did not understand why this peasant was tolerated but other peasants were not. When these reports came to the attention of the Tsarina, she dismissed them straight off. After all, how could the saint who healed her son be capable of such behaviour? Alexandra treated Rasputin like he was a relative.

This act of the royal family lowered public faith in them - the public thought that this would look bad for the country. They didn't want a scoundrel like Rasputin being too close to the Tsar. Even though the public tried very hard to get rid of him, Alexandra always talked the Tsar into letting Rasputin stay. This looked like Alexandra was having an affair with Rasputin, although most say the Tsarina was possibly too narrow minded to take a lover.

In Alexandra's letters to Rasputin, he is constantly addressed as "saviour", "darling" and as the light of her life, but there is no further evidence this theory. When the Tsar decided to leave his palace and take charge of his troops in the fight against Germany and Austria-Hungary during World War I, the people of Russia believed the Tsar had left the Tsarina - therefore, many believed, Rasputin - at the head of the Government. Although Rasputin rarely offered political advice and had no understanding of politics, the people believed that he was now the power behind the Throne, hiring and firing ministers and ordering the Emperor and Empress to do his evil bidding. As the situation with the war worsened, and public dissatisfaction grew, the rumblings against Rasputin became louder; it was only a matter of time before those who believed Rasputin to be evil would get rid of him once and for all. It would be difficult to imagine a less likely assassin than Prince Felix Yusupov. Rich and handsome, he had lived a life of privilege and luxury.

In 1908, on the death of his only brother he became sole heir to the great family fortune, said to be even larger than that of the Romanovs themselves. In 1914, he married Nicholas II's niece. Yet it was Felix Yusupov who plotted and eventually carried out the murder of Rasputin. Yusupov also appears to have had some sort of homosexual attraction to Rasputin, and there is some evidence to support the idea that he acted not only on the above motives, but also as a means of extracting personal revenge against the peasant.

There were stories that Rasputin had rejected the Prince's homosexual advances; that Rasputin had compiled a dossier on Yusupov's activities and was about to disclose its contents to the Emperor, forever ruining the Prince's name and reputation. Felix certainly never let on to his fellow conspirators that he had any motive other than his expressed desire to save Russia; but had he also acted for personal reasons, he scarcely would have revealed this to men who had agreed to participate for patriotic motives. One evening at a meeting of Russian officials, it was decided that Rasputin was putting the entire nation in danger. Prince Felix Yusupov, Vladimir Mitrofanovich Purishkevich (a member of the duma), and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich (the Czar's cousin), took control of the situation. They lured him to the Yusupov sky Palace on the pretext that Prince Felix Yusupov would introduce Rasputin to his beautiful wife. Rasputin was led to the cellar and fed poisoned cakes and wine, but these did not affect him.

Yusupov then shot the monk at point blank range and Rasputin collapsed on the floor. When Yusupov went to tell his fellow conspirators the good news, they sent him back to make sure he had done the job. On returning to inspect the body, Rasputin suddenly regained consciousness and started to throttle poor Yusupov, who was completely scared out of his wits. The Prince fled the cellar, screaming for help; when they returned Rasputin was gone. They found him in the yard crawling towards the gate and proceeded to shoot and bludgeon him. They then bound him and tossed him into the river.

When Rasputin's body was found, his bonds were broken and his lungs were filled with water, showing that he didn't actually die until he was submerged in the frozen waters. Rasputin was not responsible for the inevitable downfall of the Romanovs. The Romanovs themselves are responsible for their own demise. Rasputin had the dubious honour of being a legend in his own lifetime. In the decades since his death, he has only become more infamous. He is called "The Mad Monk", but Rasputin was never a monk.

He was simply an Orthodox believer in search of salvation. Dozens of authors have described Rasputin as un bathed and unkempt; we know, however, that he was fond of the steam bath and used it frequently, so it is unlikely that he smelled vilely. He was a peasant, with - perhaps from past experience - a less rigid set of personal hygiene standards, but he was not the repulsive monster his enemies made him out to be. He is often portrayed in legend as a drunken thug; yet his daughter Maria, who shared his flat in St. Petersburg during the years of his greatest power, recalled with honesty that her father only began drinking heavily after the 1914 assassination attempt, and only then in an effort to ease the pain from his wounds.

He certainly retained a peasant's love of alcohol, but he could apparently drink vast quantities without showing any ill effects. It's hard to truly say how influential Rasputin really was, since he knew nothing of politics and was more a parrot to the Czarina when it came to ideas he did not understand. But he did suggest ideas of treating the peasants better by giving them more rights such as land ownership and the ability to earn social status. The bottom line is that Rasputin never had as much political influence, as people believed, it was everyone's paranoia that created Rasputin's immense control of the Romanovs, in actual fact he was nothing but a man who eased the stress of the parents of a sick child.