S4 – 2: Man of Contradictions

kind of mystery. It had guided him this far, but faced with so much loss, he could only ask, in a world governed by justice, how could his baby boy be taken from him this way? It was a terrible and costly question burning its way into his heart. The rhythms and responsibilities of his life, and the teachings and traditions of his youth, they offered no answers. Blind with pain and grief and loss, he set out from home. He left his devastated wife behind, and he took to

the road. He went looking for answers. He traveled by foot. The questions would have plagued him for the weeks that it took to reach up into the ural mountains, that stone spine that split the Russian Empire in two, and he followed roads and tracks that stretched higher and higher for more than three hundred miles. But he wasn't lost. He knew where he was going. He would bring his burning questions to one of the holiest places in Russia. He would bring them to the Monastery of St. Nicholas.

It wasn't the only sacred place in its small town. In fact, it was surrounded by churches, but it was by far the most renowned. It had stood for centuries, and it's holy men were legendary. Miracles had been worked there in the mountainous upper air. It was a place

where God reached down and revealed himself. And for two generations, a great cathedral reached up from the rocks, the Cathedral of Transfiguration, where the massive bell spire and the bones of saints welcomed pilgrims from the four corners of the Empire. But it wasn't the cathedral that called to the grieving Father. No, in the face of a lost son, that grand display of power was as hollow as the home he had

left behind. His eyes turned away from the church spire, to the outskirts of the monastery grounds, to the border of the forest. It wasn't to the monks and the priests that the question would go. No, it was to the swineherd. It was in a small hut at the tree line that the hermit Macarey lived, and that is where the questions drove him to the man renowned for holiness, simplicity,

and spiritual wisdom. Seekers would later remember that Maccari's greatest delight seemed to be the chickens who shared his hut, and the words the hermit whispered to his small flock would have been amicael if they weren't filled with so much power. So what was it that he said? Well, we know at least one thing Maccari would tell his visitors about his own suffering, the sorrows and misfortunes of

my life, as he called them. If there was one thing that a grieving father could understand, it was sorrow and misfortune. So maybe it's no surprise that an encounter like this could change a man's life when he was at his lowest point. Witnessing Macaary's devotion to God could become the model for a new way of being. His old life and its place in Russia could be left behind for a new way, the way of the pilgrim. And in this encounter with Maccary he felt the power

of suffering to bring people together. Maybe that's what laid the cornerstone of the relationships that would later make this grieving father the most infamous religious wanderer in Russia and the world, because having lost his son, he suffered what the Czar and Czarina most feared, the death of the Imperial air. Because yes, the man who climbed mountains to find peace in the company of a religious hermit was named Gregory. He was a broken man, and over time

he would be remade in Macaari's image. That encounter in the mountain monastery after the death of his son was only the first time that Grigory would seek Macaari's wisdom. Through wandering and revelation. His voice would echo down the mountains and into the ear of a royal couple desperate to keep their own fragile son alive. All of that, though, would come in time, but to get there there would be many more dark days spent on winding roads on

his way to becoming resputant. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. It was a place for changing horses, at least if you were in a coach rattling along the Toura River between two Mean and Tobolsk. Anyone going that way, whether in search of prosperity or to some darker destination, was likely to make a stop, stretching their weary legs, and make sure their beasts of burden could carry them the rest of the way. A dead horse goes nowhere, after all.

So Pakrovska was the place of which journeys through Old Russia were made. But from a stop on the road, procro Scott grew into a town, A small town anyway. It was a community of hunters, fishermen and farmers, raising livestock, raising families, and scratching out a life from thy Siberian earth. All the better if you had something to offer the baggage trains traveling to and from Siberia's oldest city, and many of Prokoska's families still found their living in the

shipping trades. Men like Yafim and his son Grigory. They had done fairly well in their work too. On his land were the dozen cows and eighteen horses that he had pulled together over the years. He started as a laborer among laborers, cutting hay and loading the boats that passed by on the river. But when he became a coachman himself, hired by the state to make the trips between two men and Tobolsk, things turned around. By peasants standards,

at least life was good. Things also turned around at home, you see. Similarly, things started off with a kind of tragedy that was all too common. None of his first four children lived more than a few months. We can only imagine the pain that their mother, Anna felt to bury so many babies. But in January of eighteen sixty nine, Yefim and Anna had a son who survived. It was the stay of Saint Gregory of Nissa, so in honor of that ancient Christian mystic, they named their son Gregory.

In the twists and turns of a difficult life, he was a divine blessing, the kind of miraculous gift that can't be explained and can only be received with gratitude. Why does one child live when four others have died? If Yafim and Anna couldn't answer that question, they could at least give thanks their son was growing up and growing strong. Sure he had the typical struggles of a peasant boy. That one time he turned his teenage attitude against the local magistrates. It got Grigory thrown in jail.

That must have put honest heart and advice. But the boy was freed after just two days. After all, he was just fifteen. But it was also an early sign that Gregory would not be cowed by people with power. Other omens of his later life were likewise appearing around town. He got a bit of a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker, a heavy drinker, someone for young women to steer clear of and for parents to whisper warnings about.

But every town had one or two, right, It was hardly a story to write down in the history books. After all, he was just a young laut who worked with his father in the carriageman's trade. No doubt, he helped his father break horses, handled the tech, and learned

the power of a bit and bridle. The means of managing horses wasn't the only set of rules he learned in his teenage years, he was already making pilgrimages to the monasteries near his hometown, honoring the faith of his family, despite shrugging off its commands to temper his urges and impulses. If his mother hoped that a strong faith might help Grigory to grow out of his youthful indulgences, all the better.

In eighteen eighties six, when he came home from celebrating a Holy Day feast and brought his family joyful news he had met a peasant girl named Prescovia, and something had drawn the two together. By February of eighteen eighties said, even Gregory and Prescovia were married, living in his hometown, in his father's house. Actually, Gregory now had a path laid out before him, a life of faith, family work, and maybe something less palatable around the edges, the life

of a Siberian peasant laborer. If he was lucky, his life would be as fortunate as his father's. Eighteen horses was nothing to sneer at. But Gregory's misfortunes also followed his father's. His little son died of scarlet fever. If Yaphim and Anna had somehow made their peace with the grief of losing children. It seems the pain sent Gregory out the door and on his search for answers. That journey was the first step on his new path, but it was far from the end of his old life.

He would later say that for a while his life continued on as before, and by all accounts it's true. At the monastery in the mountains he was comforted by Maccarie, but he went back to his family, his hometown, and his life there. He went back to work too, sometimes as a coachman, sometimes fishing the rivers, sometimes farming. It was a peasant life, but a pleasant one too. Gregory and Praskovia even had more children together. As time passed.

It seemed like maybe Grigory's renewed faith from his monastery pilgrimage had prepared him to endure the life he was born into. It seemed like maybe Grigory would follow in his father's footsteps. But after more than a decade of this life, something changed. He had an awakening. The story is unclear, and it's wrapped in contradictory legends, as anything

is about this man. Some say that he took another religious pilgrimage accompanying a young priest, and the man convinced Gregory to take up the life of a holy pilgrim. Some say that Resputant went on the run from the law for stealing horses. His daughter Maria would later put it this way. One day, when he was plowing a field, he came to the end of a row, looking up. A stunning light blinded him as the figure of the Virgin Mary passed in front of the sun and looked

down on the man. He blinked to try to clear his head, but she only smiled and raised her hand gesturing to the horizons. She told Grigory what he needed to do, leave his little Siberian town and put his feet on a new path. Resputing himself in his only published book, would say that he was simply restless, tired of peasant life, and feeling a growing thirst for spiritual knowledge. Whatever the motivation, the change was sudden and real. He

stopped drinking, stopped smoking, and stopped eating meat. In every aspect of his life, he trying to follow the path of men like Macary. Even more important for his family. He left home with only the clothes on his back and the shoes on his feet. Grigory Resputant set out to cross the Russian Empire, from chapel to chapel and town to town, to plumb the depths of the great spiritual mysteries. He started to wander, and then he started to teach. He learned it on the road. A lot

of what he saw reminded him of home. Peasants everywhere, harvesting, building, plowing, and planting. He crossed Siberia on foot, and it was grueling. He would go days without food, weeks or months without a change of clothes. He was sometimes robbed of what little he had. He would later say that he had even been hunted by wolves. But to Gregory, these were not the worst enemies he faced. No like other saints and mystics before him, Gregory says that he was hunted

by spiritual enemies. The devil attacked him over and over, and demons opposed him at every step. They tried, he would say, to pull him away from God, to make him give up, to make him give in to temptations. But Gregory had the weapons to battle them too. He beat himself to fight off the temptations of the flesh, and wrapped his legs in chains to slow his walk a reminder and a punishment for his sins. In Gregory's mind, the road became a battlefield. But it's not like Gregory

only met enemies through his wandering. In fact, there were plenty of people who would have welcomed him along the way. He found friends and allies in his quest for revelation. There were people who would open their doors to him and asked him to share what he had learned. After all, he was just one of many Russian wanderers that God had sent out into the world. Here's historian Helen Coleman

to tell us more. There was a great tradition in Russian life of welcoming pilgrims, of welcoming holy people who traveled to shrines, who traveled from village to villa, living on donations. These were people who were religious searchers, who were trying to become a person that God had made them to be, and so there was great respect for that sort of religious traveler. It was a life of

work and wandering, and a life of little rest. Later, he would write, everything was interesting to me, good and bad, and he had so much to learn. He wasn't seeking knowledge from books and from stages. No, that was the worst way to answer the questions that he was trying to answer. The learned, Grigory wrote, do not go to God. They study everything by books, and that knowledge confuses them. It was just one of the many reasons that he

didn't want to become a priest. After all, he said, he met many who failed to live up to their responsibilities. He had thought of becoming a monk, but the rigid orders, days of studying theology, and cycles of trying and failing to hold to monastic discipline were the opposite of what he wanted. On the road, Gregory was hunting more than the abstractions of theologians and the rationalizations of corrupt clergy. Like other religious teachers, seekers, and believers of his day,

he rejected those things. Now he was hunting for spiritual revelation. He was looking for something earthier, the crossroads where the work of God met people in their ordinary life. And in that quest he had lots of examples to ponder. Here's Dr Coleman once again. Ordinary people, peasants, s lower class people in the cities often did things differently from how the priests would have liked them to do. Things They had local sites of pilgrimage that were not necessarily

approved by the powers that be. Local communities would often have, for example, icons that they regarded as miraculous that had not been officially approved. Official approval was never Gregory's goal from the time he had gone to the monastery to seek wisdom from Macquarie rather than the monks. It's clear that he was more interested in the faith of peasants than those in power, and Gregory's journey to find answers outside the walls of the church started in a place

that was more promising than most. After all, he was in Siberia and in Restputant's day. That meant that there was a certain independence to the people whom he met. Back in the seventeenth century, the official Orthodox Church began to to modernize and it began to reform and try

to standardize religious practice. And this was very upsetting to many Orthodox believers because as I as I just mentioned right orthodox he means right practice and the physical practice, the way that one worships is considered to be critical to reaching salvation. And so in the late seventeenth century you have large numbers of people who left the church

and became known dubbed as the old Believers. It was illegal to be an old Believer, and so many of them fled to Siberia and to the farther reaches of the Empire. And through all his encounters, the trials with enemies and the comfort of friends, visiting shrines, debating with monks, and rubbing shoulders with old believers, Grigory Rasputant started to harness his idea of what it meant to be human. Eventually,

his steps did return home. His daughter remembered one day when a bearded man who seemed like a traveling peddler slowly made his way to their door. She didn't recognize her father until he spoke in his familiar voice. He had been gone from his home and family for two years. They found him a aged man. His daughter Maria would later write that he had greatly aged. He took on suffering and fasted, sometimes making his family share in long hours of prayer, kneeling on the ground, and even beating

his head against the earth. The stories in his hometown began to change the boy who had been a drunken creep. He had taken on something new. He had grown. He was different now, and alongside the deep suspicions against him, a sort of curiosity began to rise up. As his daughter would say, grigory began to inspire, not just suspicion, but wonder. The town's scoundrel had marched away in the dust, and they were starting to whisper that he had come

back a holy man. By the first years after nineteen hundred, Rasputin had something new in his Siberian town. He had a following. It was a place of contradictions. Siberia was a part of the Russian Empire. Yes, in fact, it was in many ways the place where the Empire drew

its power. On the map, it was marked out as a treasure trove of precious resources, especially of animal pelts, and most of all the Sable Expedition after expedition was sent across the mountains into the vast expanse of land in search of that wealth, and the scale at which that wealth flooded back was enormous. The fox, Sable, and Martin firs that came back to the center of the Empire amounted to a full scale fur rush for a nation with no natural gold or silver to draw up

from the earth itself. It was the lethal harvest of this living wealth that built the imperial power. All the same, the vast expanse of land separated from the capital by the Ural mountains was far from empty. When a Costic mercenary marched in with the soldiers under his command at the end of the fifteen hundreds, he found a Mongol kingdom,

and he smashed it with musket fire. The clash came known as the Conquest of Siberia, despite the fact that exploring the rest of the massive territory, let alone crushing its people, would be the brutal work of centuries. Year by year, more towns and villages to the east had been gripped by the Empire and forced to pay tributes in furs and pelts to Moscow. At least that was the idea, but even as the Russian Empire grew in power, it still fell short of truly controlling the lands on

the other side of the mountains. Messages, military marches, and the discipline of sharp edged steel all took years to transmit from the empire central cities to the farthest reaches of Siberia, but that made it attractive to a whole different sort of people. Mercenaries traders and ruthless explorers set their sights on Siberia. They saw it as an opportunity to enrich themselves out from under the eye of the czars, and over time it gave them a reputation. Crime was rampant,

but we're not talking about petty theft. We're talking about mercenaries and traders who rigged the game, resorting to robbery, murder, bribery and extortion. Crime lords dealing in fur, ivory and human lives demanded gifts for themselves and extracted harsh levies

from the people under their power. For example, if you were a native man, you were expected to hand over somewhere between one and ten prime sable pelts each year, and that's before any extra gifts were demanded at gunpoint by the violent man who got himself appointed as your local official. Not that Moscow didn't see some part of

the problem. On the record, agents of the Czar and territorial governors were banned from scooping up the land's wealth for their own gain or from torturing the local people to force more fur from the land. But as long as the steady stream of sable was flowing back over the mountains. Who was going to stop them? It was a distance and a rocky divide that made Siberia a frontier, and one historian notes the difference between imperial rule before

and after the Tsars. The Mongols, he writes, understood that ruined people could not pay tribute. Under the Czar's Russian frontiersmen showed no such forbearance. They came to plunder. If we're more familiar with America's Wild West, well that's only because for Americans it's closer to home. Russia's Wild East wasn't all that different when it came to the way the powers of the Russian Empire thought about the land that stretched away in great plains and rocky mountains from

the seats of their society. By Restputants day, things had begun to change, though. Increasingly farms replaced the hunting grounds where the sable had been slaughtered. And if there was one thing Siberia would never run out of, it was land. So more and more people ran to the frontier, not just for wealth, but also for independence, not just the freedom to build fortunes far from the Czar's hand, but also to practice religious faith out of the Tsar's reach.

So Iberia, you see, was in some ways a place of religious freedom. Here's Heather Coleman again, Russian religion was different east of the Earls. In Siberia you have much more old belief, much more religious sectarianism. Because the area east of the Earls was a place where religious dissenters fled in the early modern period to get away from the power of the state. There's a kind of a frontier atmosphere. The official church infrastructure was much less developed.

We shouldn't exaggerate this. In western Siberia we have ancient diocese, but there's there's very little by way of seminary education and and so on. So so certainly the church has much more trouble regulating religious practice just because of distances and variety east of the Earls. Yes, the government sponsored settlers, but these proved homesteaders made a place for themselves and founded their towns alongside runaway surfs, craftsmen, religious dissenters, revolutionaries,

disgraced aristocrats, and criminal exiles. When exiles arrived in Siberia, though they sometimes found themselves in a strange position at home in Western Russia, they were dangerous criminals in Siberia they were told that as educated and literate men they were made government officials. Of course, I can't help seeing hints of the history of Australia in that particular move. Like Australia, and like America's Great Plains, Siberia was a

place of immense size and beauty. It was also the stage on which human greed and violence had played out for centuries. The counter forces of fortune hunting and families seeking a place to practice their religion in peace pulled Siberia in different directions and brought up sons who clothed themselves in contradictions, simplicity yet cunning, charm yet viciousness, devotion yet greed, Men like Gregory Rasputin. The steam rose up

between them. From their cups of tea. Gregory sat with the Father Superior of the Seven Lakes Monastery and a group of his theology students. The two men were talking about Rasputant's plans and the places he intended to go on his next trip. Resputant mentioned that his next journey would take him to the capital. The Father Superior would later remember thinking to himself that the city would ruin the Siberian peasant. But what happened next was the thing

that convinced him. Grigory Rasputin was filled with divine power. Grigory looked into the man's eyes and seemed to read his thoughts. The city wouldn't ruin him, he said, after all, he went with the power of God on his side. After that encounter, the monastery's father Superior became one of Grigory's biggest supporters. His word care read some weight in the nearby city of Kazan, and when Gregory stopped there,

he took the city by storm. His bold preaching was shored up by well developed confidence, road hardened independence, and an ignorance of social niceties, and it was a smash hit. He didn't hold back from speaking bluntly, even to the highest church leaders in the city. Challenging the father Superior of the monastery was only the least of it, and

word got around. Soon people from across Kazan were coming to him for help, for comfort, and for advice, and the stories came back out with them, stories of miraculous healing of burdens lifted, of a powerful teacher whose words cut to the bone. Other more unsettling stories circulated to about the way he treated the women who came to hear his teaching or for healing. He was seen holding their hands, kissing women in public, going with them to

bath houses. In later years, it was even reported that he was found laying in bed with women who came to him for spiritual teaching. And there was the way he talked. Yes, he was playful with just about everyone, but with women, well, the nicknames he came up with were less creative and more suggestive. Apparently the love he received from God only went so far in satisfying his

hunger with men too. He was known to be what we might call tasteless and insolent, but it's hard to feel anything but a creeping disgust at the whispered stories that began about how he translated his spiritual influence into sexual coercion. He wouldn't be the first, and he was far from the last, but it's mystifying all the same that these early stories could grow right alongside his reputation as a mystic. Maybe it lent his reputation and element of risque danger. Maybe it made him a bad boy

of the road. But of course, even his increasing disregard for the sexual boundaries of the people around him wrapped in the language of spirituality. And it was this language and this teaching that he used not just to convince the women around him to follow his lead, but also to convince the spiritual leaders in Kazan that not only was he not violating church teachings, but had in fact his relationships with women were an expression of divine love,

not only pure but even purifying. For one, he convinced the father superior of the monastery just outside the city. In fact, when they sat down together to talk theology, Rasputin won him over, and soon enough they were friends. Of course, that could be because of who else Rasputin was close to in the city. One story says that what brought him to Kazan in the first place was the wealthy widow of a merchant who was grieving the death of her husband. Rasputin would have had his reasons

to get close to her. Some lingering legends recount that Grigory was a paid escort on her own pilgrimages. It may have even been through her that he met the head monasteries and the our command rights of the city as well. And no doubt, it pays to have wealthy and powerful friends, all the better if they carry the enormous authority of the Russian Church. That seems to have been one of the lessons respute and learned on the road.

Interestingly enough, his time wandering among peasants seems to have solidified his belief in the divine order of the Czarist regime. But Resputin it became clear to honor God everyone should stay in their place. Of course, if you were a wealthy merchant or an our command right, well it could be nice to hear these things said right into your ear, and from a peasant. No less, if that came with some rude jokes and maybe a few unseemly encounters on

the side, well that could be excused. After all, what do you expect from a peasant. No one seems to have understood this dynamic, with all its limitations, opportunities and blind spots, as well as Rasputin did himself. But he wasn't going to stay in Kazan, No, he was going to go further. He was going to go to St. Petersburg. Parsing Rasputant is no simple task, but a century of legends has sent generations of people looking for answers, and some of them have started by trying to dissect each

and every part of Grigory's life. His family name is no exception. Even in his own day, some people were saying that the name Rasputin came from the Russian word rasput nick. After all, it means depraved, and what could be more fitting for the man, at least in the eyes of his enemies. Surely it was a label he took as a young man for his predatory habits in his hometown. Or maybe it was his father who was a predator and he inherited the name and the habits both.

Not to mention that for years the rumor mill went round the clock trying to pin the label of horse thief on both Grigory and his father, a terrible accusation in any intier community. Most historians, though, would see this

as idle speculation. After all, anyone who has looked at the records can see the name in Siberia going back into the sixteen hundreds, And in her father's defense, Maria Resputant says that nearly half of the people in their hometown and the surrounding regions had the name in their family tree. So if the name meant scoundrel. Well, it was a widespread accusation, but there's a more likely route.

It seems that Rasputant probably comes from the Russian word rasputa, which meant something more like crossroads and for people who built their town along a carriage route between major cities. Well, that makes sense. But there's a deeper and darker aspect of that heritage too, you see. One of the historians who has studied Rasputant's life, Douglas Smith, notes that there were some odd beliefs about crossroads that were still hanging around in Grigory's day. Going back a long way, It's

not like cross were just a neutral kind of geography. Now. They were a place of meetings and not least a place of spiritual encounter where humans were in danger of coming face to face with a spirit traveling from a different, darker place, a place where the spirits you've met could be evil. We can't make too much of it. If the name Rasputant refers to a crossroads, well what did that have to say about Grigory? Maybe not too much, But hindsight lets us see a man who straddled worlds,

who unintentionally was part of toppling them. With his road leading him to the capital. Gregory was about to cross paths with the most powerful people in the Russian Empire, and his fateful meeting with the Romanovs would give us the host of legends and rumors that we still know today. But when Grigory Rasputant set his sights on St. Petersburg, he wasn't the only one. After all, the first years of the nineteen hundreds would see Nicholas and Alexandra facing

opponents on every field, both foreign and domestic. War and revolution came to the Empire, and before the year nineteen o five was out, the land ruled by the czars would already be slipping from one world into the next. So it wasn't just Grigory Rasputin whose life was at a crossroads. It was the Romanov family as well, and in fact, the entirety of Imperial Russia. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for

next week. When the crowd arrived at the palace, the infantry opened fire and the cavalry charged. It was a massacre. Over one thousand of the marchers were killed, and two thousand were left screaming in the street. Nicholas wrote in his diary, how sad to the rest of Russia. Though it was more than sad, it was an outrage. They called it their own bloody Sunday, and they rallied to the call. Riots and bombs exploded across the empire. Over

one thousand government officials were killed. Grand Duke Serge, who had married Alexandra's older sister, was hit by a blast that scattered his carriage over the roofs of the surrounding buildings. Was it enough to challenge the power of the czars? Nicholas's sister continued to see the Romanov way it was,

she said a Lack of Authority. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio, with research by Sam Alberty, writing by Carl Nellis, and original music by Chad Lawson. Learn more about our contributing historians, source materials, and link to our other shows over at grim and Mild dot com, Slash Unobscured, and as always, thanks for listening.