What is the most stressed out you have ever felt in your entire life?  If you've ever experienced the extremes of stress, you know how it can affect you. It can make you sick, weak, irrational, irritable at the extremes. Stress can be debilitating.

So I want you to imagine, put yourself in the place of someone who went through one of the most stressful situations that I can imagine.   Her name was Empress Alexandra of the Russian Empire. She was born in Northwest Germany, and spoke fluent German and English, but fell in love with Prince Nicholas of the Russian Empire.

She almost didn't marry him because she hated Russia so much, but she really, really loved him, and so she finally did agree to the marriage.  But now, she spent all her time in a country where she spoke the language haltingly. Even after years of living there and where she never truly felt at home.  She was also a naturally introverted and very private person.

She had been born into minor nobility in Germany in what was a pretty obscure situation. But here she was like the ultimate celebrity. Her every move private and public was scrutinized for meaning and to ensure that it conformed to proper manners.

And not only that, but she soon found that the Russian monarchy, that she had married into, was in terminal decline. And her husband did not have the strength of will, the strength of character, to maintain it.  The only thing that she could contribute to the success of the monarchy was an heir. And she was failing at that, despite her best efforts.

Four pregnancies had resulted in four girls.  everyone wanted was a boy, an heir, who could be the next czar.  When the fifth pregnancy did finally result in a beautiful baby boy, who she named Alexei, She was soon devastated to learn that he was a hemophiliac, a disease that stopped his blood from clotting  and meant that he would be in constant danger of life threatening injury from even the most mild of physical exercise.

Add to all of this the fact that there are revolutionary communist elements in Russia that want to see you and your husband dead. So you got constant negative stories about you in the press, very serious death threats against you, constant surveillance of your every move, and a son who you constantly have to monitor because his life is always in imminent danger.

So in this state, you take a much needed vacation with your family. But the roads are rough. Too rough, as it turns out. Your son begins to complain, and then his complaints turn into shouts of agony  at every bump of the stagecoach.  BY the end of the journey, little Alexei was nearly unconscious.

For the next ten days, he screamed in pain, and moaned to his mother, Mama, help me. Won't you help me?  It was so disturbing that the emperor, Tsar Nicholas, couldn't bear to watch and had to excuse himself from the room.

Preparations were made for the little boy's death, and last rites were even administered to the boy, who was in such agony that this didn't even appear to bother him. When I am dead, Alexei asked his mother. It will not hurt anymore. Will it, Mama?   As a last resort, Alexandra wrote to a spiritual advisor who she had met back in St.

Petersburg, Grigory Rasputin.   She asked him to pray for the boy.  He was too far away to make the journey himself, but he telegrammed back immediately. Quote, God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not be sad. The little boy will not die. Do not let the doctors torment him too much.  Alexandra wrote after receiving the telegram, quote, I am not a bit anxious myself now. During the night, I received a telegram from Father Grigory, and he has reassured me completely.  The next day, the internal bleeding stopped. Little Alexi would live,  and the reputation of that spiritual advisor would rapidly grow. Soon, everyone in Russia would know the name Rasputin.   📍

Hello, and welcome to How to Take Over the World. This is Ben Wilson. Today I've got an episode for you on Grigory Rasputin,  the Russian mystic and advisor to the Tsar.  And why do an episode on Rasputin? He's kind of known as a villain, PEople think of him as an evil, sinister, almost satanic figure when they think of Rasputin. And one reason to do this is just because, , he's very misunderstood.

I think that the popular narrative about Rasputin is more different from the truth than almost anyone I've heard of.

you know, as I was preparing this, I went and looked at some YouTube videos to see what other people had to say about Rasputin. And it's amazing to me that even people who make their living as history podcasters and, and history, uh, YouTubers say things that are just wildly untrue.

That are rumors that have been thoroughly debunked by historians who have looked into it.  So I wanted to clear some of that up

One of the other things I wanted to learn from him is persuasion. Is how it is that he was able to get this following if people thought that he was so sinister, uh, Peter Teal says that you should run your startup like a cult and that's something that Rasputin did. Uh, so I think there's something interesting about that of, of how do you get people to buy in? So deeply, so intensely that your following is almost cult like.  I think it's also interesting, you know, Rasputin is someone who came from nowhere. You know, he was just a poor peasant from the middle of Siberia and he really punched way above his weight. He came to be one of the top advisors of the emperor of one of the biggest empires on earth, the Russian empire.

, So I do think that there is a lot that we can learn from him. I also think it's a lesson in how to not do all these things because his story does not have a happy ending. Many people have heard of his death. It's one of the most iconic deaths of all time. So, . I actually was shocked at how much I learned from this story.

I just thought that it would be interesting, but I really think that Rasputin is someone who, uh, yeah, it's not necessarily someone you want to emulate, but it's someone that you can learn a lot from this episode. , unlike most major episodes is for subscribers only because I wanted to do something.

Nice. For my subscribers. This is a love note from me to you. You guys are putting up 7 a month to help make sure that I can do this full time. So, mwah. This is a full episode just for subscribers. If you are not a premium subscriber, you are getting half of the episode. If you want to listen to the full thing, go to the link in the show notes, or go to takeoverpod.

supercast. com and you can fill out your information there and become a premium subscriber and listen to the full thing.  

my source for this episode is a book called Rasputin, Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. By Douglas Smith.  And it's an interesting book. I wouldn't recommend it for most people. Because it's really, really in depth, it gets into like every minor detail of Rasputin's life. And I actually think it's a really good book.

I'm glad it exists because Rasputin, more than anyone I have ever read about, has more myth,  , around his life, more made up stories than anyone I've ever heard. Like, the popular conception of his life is just completely different from the truth. And so Douglas Smith is approaching it almost like a lawyer, kind of.

He's going through each accusation. And he's diving into it to see what is true and what is not. And so that makes it really in depth. But if you're just a casual reader who wants to pick up a fun biography, it's not exactly that. It's a little too heavy to enjoy in that way. Um, but if you're really interested in Rasputin, and you really want to know everything about his life, then, , it is really well researched and really well done.  One last thing is this one does need a little bit of a content warning. There's just a lot of talk about sex and a little bit of talk of violence as well. So if you're listening in the car with your kids, if they're little kids,  this might not be the one.

You might want to go back and listen to something else from the catalog.  And one more warning. If you've listened to this podcast for a long time, you've heard me complain about French pronunciations. Well, French is a breeze compared to Russian. So, um, I, uh, I'm sure I got some of these pronunciations wrong, but, um, it is what it is\ so with all that said, let's dive in.  Grigory Yefimovich   Rasputin was born in Pokrovsko, Siberia on January 21st, 1869.

 And Siberia where he grew up, you can think of as Russia's Wild East. It was very similar to America's Wild West, right? was very open, there was a lot of land to be had, so a lot of people moving out and starting life over, and so, you kind of have to...

Um, start civilization from the ground up,  that leads to a lot of conflict, a lot of violence, a lot of opportunity,  and overall it was a wild place and a place where anything was possible. He was born to a pretty typical Siberian peasant family. His father had managed to acquire a dozen or so cows and almost 20 horses.

And that's not extravagant wealth, but it was fairly prosperous by Siberian peasant standards

Rasputin was the family name. And there's some words that are similar to Rasputin that have led people to suggest that this was not actually his last name, but it was an epithet. I meant to suggest that he was some kind of outcast or pervert.

, and that is not true. There's no evidence for that. It actually was the family name, Rasputin.  With a play on words, you can turn it into an insult, but his name was just Rasputin.  We know almost nothing about his childhood.

He would have learned to farm, to care for livestock, and to fish, but not to read. Rasputin was illiterate for the first 30 or so years of his life, which was normal. The literacy rate was only about 4 percent in Siberia at the time.   We do know that he was a defiant and independent minded child. One of the few things that we know for sure about his childhood is that he was sentenced to two days in jail when he was 15 years old for adopting a rude attitude toward the district head of his area.

He was also known for getting drunk and apparently committed a couple of small thefts. So, he was a little bit of a troublemaker, very independent minded.

Now, I mentioned the rumor about his last name. Again, rumors. are kind of like one of the defining themes of Rasputin's life. Uh, there's a good quote from the book, uh, by Smith. He says, quote, To separate Rasputin from his mythology, I came to realize, was to completely misunderstand him. There is no Rasputin without all the stories about Rasputin.

And so, there are all these stories. One is that he was a horse thief. And that he came from a long line of horse thieves and horse thievery back then was like really serious, right? It was like grand theft auto, , horses were very valuable. And so to be a horse thief. Was really looked down on. You go to prison for a long, long time.

Um but if you look at the history, not true. , if he had been a horse thief, he would have been charged, you know, that would have been a big deal. And you can go look through the records and neither Rasputin nor any of his relatives, any of his close relatives, at least were horse thieves. There are other rumors, you know, that, .

He was a rapist  that everyone in the village knew that he would try and seduce anyone that, uh, he had sex relations within his family, that there was incest and stuff like that. Again, as far as we can tell,  none of this is true. Uh, people try and project backwards and give him this dark childhood.

And, , it appears that he just had a normal, typical childhood admittedly. , yeah, he's a little bit of a troublemaker, but again, this is kind of the wild west, right? So a lot of people are, and it wasn't really out of the norm.

In 1887 at age 18 Rasputin married Praskovia Dubrovina. , his wife, they would have a happy marriage, and she would be incredibly faithful to him in every sense of the word. They had seven children, three of whom survived to adulthood.  They lived in Rasputin's father's house, which was a fairly typical setup for the time.

And again, um, it was a, it was a pretty typical, you know, life for Rasputin when he was a young adult. Uh, here's what he had to say about it. Quote, When I first lived, before the age of twenty eight, as they say in the world, I lived in peace. That is, I loved the world and acted justly, and looked for consolation from the secular point of view.

I often joined baggage trains. I worked a great deal as a coachman. I fished and plowed fields. All this is really good for a peasant. I had many sorrows, too. Whatever mistake was made somewhere, I was blamed, although I was not involved.  Workmen from teams mocked me. I plowed hard and slept little, and I kept asking my heart how to find some way to be saved.

I looked at priests as models, but it was not exactly what I wanted. So I started going on pilgrimages, and I was quick minded and observant. I was interested in everything good and bad. I had questions, but there was no one to ask what the answer was. I did a lot of traveling and searching and tried everything in life.

So, as he says, he lived pretty normally until 28. He gives some of his complaints. Um, but at 28 he becomes a pilgrim. And this is kind of like a thing. In Russian society at the time, this is the end of the 19th century. And there were millions of pilgrims and they would go from place to place, usually to holy sites.

And most of them were kind of unattached. They were vagrants. In fact, the state looked down on all these pilgrims. They didn't like having them around because as you can imagine, criminal elements could kind of hide  in this pilgrim population. And, uh, and avoid the law that way. But Rasputin loved it. He loved seeing new places, learning new things.

As he said, he had these questions. He wanted to learn more about the deeper things in life and didn't think that they could be answered in his village. So he just started wandering.  And that was something that was atypical for him as a pilgrim. Again, there were many of these pilgrims, but most of them did not have a wife and kids back at home.

They were mostly unattached people.

So as he is a pilgrim, and going place to place, he has a miraculous experience that is a conversion experience for him. San Simeon appears to him and tells him, quote, Give all that up and become a new man and I will exalt you.  Apparently this experience cured him of insomnia and bedwetting, which he suffered from well into adulthood.

And at this time, he also gives up drinking, smoking, and eating meat.

To complete the conversion experience,  he has another experience with an icon of the Virgin Mary. He sleeps with it, you know, next to him. I guess he fell asleep praying.

He has this icon of the Virgin Mary with him. And he wakes up in the morning and sees tears streaming down the icon's face. And he hears a voice, quote, I am weeping for the sins of mankind. Gregory go wander and cleanse the people of their sins.

So he continues this pilgrim wandering lifestyle. Uh, they were called straniki, these wanderers,  but he is remarkable as a straniki for a few reasons. Uh, one is when bandits robbed him, he would freely give them everything he had saying, it's not mine, it's God's.

So he's very unattached to things and what little food he had. He would always share. He often went hungry because he would give his food to other wanderers, other Straniki.  

And so he's one of these Straniki, uh, but he's kind of a more intense, more spiritual one. And because people see him giving away all this stuff, uh, and living a little bit differently, uh, people start to come to him and ask him questions.  He has questions himself, and so he becomes a pupil of a man named Macari, Starets Macari.

And it's with Macari that he begins to undertake serious study of the Bible. So, of course, first he has to learn to read, and he learns to read by studying the Bible, and he begins to become something of a Starets himself. So Starets means elder, And this is another thing that was common in Russia. All these starets, these kind of old sages that you could go to, to get wisdom from.

So Rasputin is a little too young to be a starets in the true meaning of the word.  But he does start to be considered something of a holy man. He's very good at reading people, to the point that people consider him, uh, like a, a mind reader.  

And he's very good at talking to people about God in a way that, um, gives them peace of mind and helps them feel good.   His is a very earthy, humble gospel that emphasizes love, solid morals, and appreciation for the natural world.  So at first, this is just kind of an informal thing. He's talking to people while he travels.

And people really like talking to him and so word starts getting around  and then when he's home, when he's not, you know, going on these pilgrimages, people begin to come to his little Siberian village to hear from him, ask him questions. He starts to get some acolytes, some disciples, people who hang around, come to stay with him and hang on his every word.

And anytime you get followers, especially female followers, you get whispers and rumors. And so, , people in his village start to get a little bit uncomfortable with him. Uh, because he's got these women staying with him and these women are, you know, hanging on his every word. And so rumors start to go around that he's sleeping with all these women and he's essentially running a harem out of his house.

At this point,  probably nothing to these rumors whatsoever.

So he's got these followers, uh, and after a while he decides to go on tour. He's kind of outgrown his little village, so he goes and visits a larger city called Kazan.

At first to visit a wealthy widow who hears about him and is in need of spiritual counseling. But then he begins to meet with other people and he becomes something of a star.  One account said, quote, My wife's despair grew into insanity and the doctors couldn't do a thing.

Rasputin. Imagine this, after speaking with her for half an hour, she became totally serene.  

so he's becoming a star because of his ability to heal people, to read minds, to ask insightful questions, and for his spiritual counsel. But once again, people are accusing him of improper relations with his followers. And by the way, we'll get into this more later, but they were probably right to an extent.

Rasputin was never the sexual monster that people made him out to be, but he liked to party, he had a weakness for women, and he was carrying on extramarital affairs with some of his followers, and he was always hitting on women. He's always, like, kind of seeing what he could get away with. And, uh, with his followers, he was very familiar with them.

Um, not sexually, but he would kiss them and hold them and, um, act towards his female followers in ways that other people considered inappropriate in public.    So there are these accusations starting to pop up. But at this point, he's still quite popular. And if Kazan was his warm up tour, he then decides to subsequently go to the big leagues and go to St.

Petersburg. At the time, St. Petersburg was the seat of the Russian government, uh, kind of. It was where the Tsar resided. And whereas St. Petersburg is now Russia's second city, at the time, it rivaled Moscow as the heart of Russia.  

Once again, he takes the city by storm and, um, well, let's just read some accounts. I think it's interesting to see what it is that draws people in. There's one young priest who wrote, quote, Rasputin was a truly out of the ordinary person in terms of his sharp mind and his religious focus.

You had to see him, the way he prayed in the cathedral. He stood just like a string under tension. His face turned to the heights, and then, with great speed, he would begin to cross himself and bow. I think it was precisely in the exceptional energy of his religiosity that lay the main reason for his influence on believers.

Somehow, we have all become unleavened, or, to use the expression of our savior, the salt in us has lost its potency. We are no longer the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We have all cooled down,  and then suddenly a burning torch appears.

What sort of spirit he had, what sort of quality, we did not want to know, nor could we have discovered, for we lacked the necessary knowledge. But the magnificence of this new comet quite naturally attracted attention.

So there you see, he's focusing on his focus, and on his deep, burning passion for his religiosity and his relationship with God. His daughter Maria would later say, quote, 20 years of pilgrimages and wanderings on foot. His peasant life, his love of the soil and solitude had developed in him that warm-hearted kindliness, that simplicity of bearing that bluntness of speech and at the same time, that rather overbearing independence, which marks the recluse. There has been talk of his lack of sophistication, his irresponsibility.

And it is true where he was concerned with money, but at the same time, he showed in his dealings with men an extraordinary clairvoyance which enabled him forthwith to fathom their most secret impulses. A rugged bearing accustomed to speak his mind, never intimidated because he always plumbed the depths of men's thoughts.

Such was my father.  But the capital, sophisticated, worldly, cynical, did not greet a peasant kindly. of him turned a great many people off. Dirty, they called him, even though he was not. Slovenly, only because he did not style his hair and beard like the smart men of St. Petersburg. His refusal to kowtow to the rich and mighty was described as ill breeding.

So there are a few things there. He combines the peasant simplicity and this burning sincerity of belief with a natural predisposition to understand people and these piercing eyes that everyone commented on. That was another thing. When you read accounts of him, when he first shows up in St. Petersburg, people can't stop talking about his eyes.

One account says, quote, my attention was chiefly directed to his eyes. His gaze was always concentrated and direct. And a strange phosphorescent light played the entire time in his eyes. He continually stroked his listeners with his eyes.

I noticed that it was precisely his persistent staring that had the greatest effect on those gathered and particularly on the women.   So if you've listened, you've heard this before. There are other great people,  who use this trick. But staring people in the eyes tends to capture their attention.

And this really, really worked for him. Uh, there's tons of quotes who talk about this. Uh, one says, quote, his eyes pierced you like needles. Another said, he had especially amazing eyes, gray that can, in an instant, burn red. His eyes are irresistible. They are filled with their own inner magnetism. When in the presence of women, they catch fire with an unusual passion.

Another said, quote, there is something disturbing and alarming in the metallic expression of those cold gray eyes that pierce straight through you. And that's  another common theme, is that people felt like, when they looked in his eyes, He saw into their souls like they couldn't keep any secrets from him.

There's one experience  a woman a Polish countess Meets him at a party and she shrieks and flees the party screaming quote. I can't I can't handle those eyes They see everything I can't take it  Another woman found his gaze so penetrating that she felt, like, violated. And she ran to a church for confession after he did nothing more than just look at her.

And I don't know if that's something that can be replicated. I think I mean, look at the pictures of him. He really does have captivating eyes. But I also think part of it is this way that he stared at people and that really captured their attention and drew them in and made them for whatever reason, want to disclose things to him.

Hey, it's Ben. Thanks so much for listening to this point. If you want to listen to the full episode, make sure that you subscribe at takeoverpod. supercast. com or use the link in the show notes.

So until next time, thanks for listening to How to Take Over the World.

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