As one historian once said, all the problems of the Russian Empire began in the nursery.

If the Russian people had found out that the heir, the only male child in the family, had a debilitating condition that could kill him at any time.

That would have been very very politically dangerous for the Russian throne.

So it had to be a secret.

So much so Nicholas didn’t even tell his mother.

He didn’t tell his sisters.

[music] It was the big state secret.

I think the upper classes are living this sort of quite empty existence.

They need something to excite them and they also need some kind of spiritual grounding.

And along into the midst of this comes Rasputin.

By the end of the 19th century, by the time Alexier is born, the autocracy is under pressure from various quarters.

You know, sort of liberals demanding a constitution, socialists demanding a revolution, nationalists demanding the dissolution of the empire.

So in this moment of kind of political uncertainty, a public acknowledgement of hemophilia would have been understood to be a very dangerous move.

[music] [music] Heat.

Heat.

Rasputin grew up in a village called Picroska, which was pretty remote.

I mean, it was a it had a dirt road leading down the middle.

There were buildings on either side, singlestory buildings.

It was a very, very basic place.

There was no school.

[music] There was a church.

There was a tavern.

That was pretty much it.

Even when he was young, he seems to have had this reputation as having a kind of [music] second sight, as being able to see inside people’s minds.

I don’t think it was purely a magical reputation.

And I think it was already [music] at this young age built on the idea that he was some kind of holy agent that he had this ability to [music] channel God if you like.

There are quite a few possible reasons why he left Broska.

Certainly, it’s possible that he was already in trouble with the law, that he’d been thieving, that he’d been fighting, that he’d been drinking, and he kind of had to go.

That’s perfectly possible.

Uh, but there’s also a definite streak in him of restlessness.

You know, he wanted to wander.

It seems he had some kind of religious calling, certainly a genuine religious belief.

And the sort of life that would have suited him was the life of the religious wanderer.

Now this was already a phenomenon in Russia.

this idea [music] of people who had uh the Holy Spirit in them who would just [music] get up and go and would wander around Russia living on charity.

And this is what Rasputin chose to do.

One very important event in in Rasputin’s life which I think was very formative for him was when he stayed for a period in a monastery.

He didn’t stay very long there because he realized very quickly that monastery life was not for him.

It was too confining.

It meant that he had to conform to other people’s opinions to other people’s rules.

That wasn’t Rasputin at all.

But one thing that really did appeal to him there was uh he met this uh hermit, a very holy man called uh Machiri.

And this man had been uh a sinner basically, you know, he lived a non-spiritual life and then had settled down as a hermit.

And what he basically showed was that you could be a holy man, a spiritual man, having sinned.

More to the point, I think it showed that you kind of needed to sin in order to be able to live a proper spiritual holy life.

If you didn’t know what it was to sin, you couldn’t be redeemed.

You couldn’t be properly [music] holy.

And of course, that fed right into Rasputin’s narrative because Rasputin was a man with a huge appetite for life, a lust for life.

He enjoyed having sex.

enjoyed being a sort of big physical presence in the real world with other people.

And what Machir told him was, not only is that okay, it’s important.

If you don’t know what [music] it is to sin, how can you be a truly spiritual person? One of his huge passions in life apart from making revolution was walking in the Alps.

So people often why were all these places in these groups in exile in little old Switzerland and it was largely because a lot of them were like walking in the mountains.

Lenin wanted to create a revolution leading to a socialist society that would abolish exploitation, abolish private property and hold all ownership in common.

Other communists wanted workers to own their own factories and peasants to own their own land through communal ownership.

What Lenin wanted was everything [music] owned by this organization that was going to lead the working class, the vanguard of the working class.

[music] So everything would be run by the party.

This is a bit of battle in how you organize a socialist society, you know, all the way through.

Just who ultimately does own it.

Lenin by then is is one of the leaders of the revolutionary left.

The secret police in Russia have been extremely efficient in [music] getting rid of socialist revolutionary groups.

That’s when Lenin began this nomadic exiled life of an underground revolutionary party set in Munich [music] in Paris in London moving around where the Acron’s reach is less great.

London was much easier because the police didn’t cooperate with the Russian police.

Lenin lives [music] in exile in London for 2 years and very early one morning there’s a knock on the door and it’s Leon Trosky who’s just [music] escaped from Siberia.

Trosky is a farmer’s son from agricultural Ukraine.

But what they identified quite quickly by the time he was 9 years old that he’s a once in a generation intellect.

Luckily for him, they’re wealthy.

They have money.

they can afford to send him to an elite school.

From an early age, he was writing speeches.

He was writing pamphlets or getting things in school newspapers and journals, especially at university, so that you could go back to his very early teens.

He was very much on the cusp of wanting to be involved in the national debate.

Trosky’s political life started once he got to university in Adessa.

That’s where he was studying philosophy, but his studies were secondary to actually being involved in political debate [music] at university.

He became very well known for his fiery speeches [music] and primarily his intellect.

He had very good arguments to give.

It was the style in which he could write pamphlets.

It was the kind of energy he brought to any kind of debate which led then to coercing uh workers in Adessa, railway workers to actually protest and [music] go on strike.

He’s now a target.

He’s gathering a name to the point where the authorities do want to clamp down on him.

He’s been arrested.

He’s going to go into exile and that’s where he’s coming into contact with the writings and the name of someone like Lenin.

So in 1902, Trosky escapes Russia, gets out to the west and would end up in London.

And that’s where the name Trosky comes from because he used a fake passport from his original jailer in Odessa who was called Leon Trosky.

When he’s arrived in London in 1902, there are a lot of Russian exiles and revolutionaries and one of which would be a man that would shape not just the politics but the life of Trosky and that is Lenin.

That’s their first meeting.

Knocks on the door, wakes him up before breakfast.

um they spend the whole day together just talking about politics.

They instantly [music] got on and it was a real meeting of minds.

They spent hours and hours debating the kind of politics they wish to bring in the kind of society they wish to build.

They were on the same road Trosky and Lenin in terms of well this is the kind of thing we do want to have.

But their paths would slightly separate in terms of how how was that going to be achieved.

The party set up, the newspapers run.

Then occurs the biggest split, the one that created, you know, the Boleviks and the [music] Mencheviks.

Bulcheism was led by Lenin and that was the radical side [music] of this split in the factions in terms of what boeism was about was seizing power, fermenting revolution, establishing control within the country that they they hoped [music] would would be home in Russia and then affecting radical change.

Lenin wanted a very tightly organized group of which demanded 24-hour a day utter loyalty.

The other side of the argument was the Mencheviks.

Yes, they wanted change, but the change that would come would be more gradual than bulsheism.

So, you’ve [music] got these two demi ideologies clashing against each other.

What Trosky wanted to do was trying to navigate a path that would bring both sides together.

It’s not really about ideas and it’s not really about organization.

It’s not it’s about rivalry.

It’s about who is going to be the power.

[music] But even the split and the wording and the language used shows [music] a big element of why Lenin was going to come out on top.

It all comes from one particular resolution [music] about party structure and Lenin wins the vote.

Lenin could think [music] in headline terms.

Lenin could think very strategically in very very simple winning [music] terms.

Bolshevik is the majority and Menik [music] are the minority.

Now who starts a political party calling itself the minority? So he called himself the majority because [music] winners call themselves the majority.

[music] When the engagement of Alexandra Nicholas became apparent at the Cobberg wedding where Queen Victoria was reigning, she accepted the fact that they truly truly loved each other and that she couldn’t stand in their way.

But she looked upon Russia as what she called an unsafe throne.

And she had told Ella, Alexandra’s sister, when Ella married in 1884, “I would not wish a Russian husband on any of you four Hessa’s sisters.

Russia was turbulent though.

There was a growing revolutionary movement, political assassination left, right, and center.

The queen was fearful.

I don’t think that Nicholas enjoys office.

He does ascend the throne with a feeling of duty, but not with a not with a feeling of great excitement.

Alexandra had this very arrogant view which she explained to Queen Victoria.

I don’t need the Russian people, you know, to make myself visible.

You know, they accept my husband’s divine writers are to be loved and obeyed and adored.

And she really didn’t think she needed to make herself [music] accessible to them in that kind of hands-on way that Queen Victoria did.

[cheering] The revolution, you know, really begins the 9th of January 1905 when a priest, Father Gapon, leads a procession of workers towards the Winter Palace bearing icons with Nicholas and saints because they want to submit a petition to the Zar to sort of, you know, protest their working condition.

So very much this idea that Nicholas himself [music] has of the common people that what they really want is an unmediated relationship with the Zar father figure.

You know they don’t want to have to deal with like you know ministers and government inspectors but troops panic and open fire on the crowd.

The estimates are around about 200 people are killed, hundreds more are injured.

So it’s it’s a terrible massacre.

His own standing, the standing of the court has been very badly damaged in the Russo-Japanese war and then you’ve got this terrible political crisis unfolding in your own capital.

The violence continues.

is there was a general strike in [music] September 1905 and that’s the point where his prime minister Serge Vitta comes to Nicholas and basically says you have two options you either grant a [music] kind of constitution or you send in the troops but if you send in the troops I’m not sure it would work anyway you know so that’s the choice so the point is that Nicholas is dragged kicking and screaming to this point.

He does not want to grant a constitution.

He does not believe in parliaments or the sovereignty of the people.

He believes that he should continue to rule in accordance with the dictates of his own conscience.

But he is finally persuaded.

He grants [music] a doomer which is not a parliament crucially.

It cannot [music] make law.

It is a consultative assembly where government legislation can be discussed by representatives of the people.

So it’s an an elected assembly where the government can say we are thinking of doing X.

What do you think about it? And the representatives of the people are allowed to say.

It’s still essentially an absolute monarchy.

It’s not quite as absolute as it was, but power really still resides with the throne.

So the doomer doesn’t really have political [music] parliamentary teeth.

What it does have is a kind of public influence because it it provides a forum within which deputies are now able to stand up and deliver speeches [music] which can be critical of government policy or critical of the zar.

But Nicholas he is not a supporter of constitutional monarchy.

You know, he humiliates the doomer when it is first convened.

He refuses to go to the doomer.

He insists that they come to him.

The first piece of legislation that he gives to the doomer to discuss our plans to build a lingerette in a girl’s boarding school somewhere in provincial Russia.

You know, the whole attitude is that he has in a moment of weakness made a concession that he is now trying to kind of [music] claw back.

When Rasputin uh moves to the capital to St.

Petersburg, it’s so completely different.

Um it’s the most sophisticated part of Russia.

Um it’s very close to to Europe.

But it’s also a place which is suffering a kind of identity crisis.

You know, Russia is moving away from its sort of agrarian past, its feudal past if you like.

It’s moving towards this sort of modern industrial future and it’s kind of lost.

It doesn’t know where it is.

I think the upper classes are are are living this sort of quite empty existence, this sort of vacuous existence as they’re sleeping with each other.

They’re going to exhibitions, [music] they’re doing this, that, and the other, but they’ve done it all.

They need something to excite them.

And they also need some kind of spiritual grounding.

And along into the midst of this comes Rasputini with his piercing blueg gray eyes, with his strange hair, with his strange peasant clothes, with his total lack of any social graces, with his ability to talk to the upper classes as though they’re just peasants.

At the time Rasputin came to prominence in the early 1900s, the Russian aristocracy had been experimenting and flirting a lot with the occult, [music] with scances, with gurus and faith healers [music] and anything kind of a bit oddball.

They were very open-minded to that kind of alternative world.

And that’s why he was adopted by a kind of groupies, aristocratic female groupies who clustered around him for the pearls of wisdom that he dropped and who began to believe that he had the power of some kind of faith healing autosuggestive power.

No one’s ever really explained it.

It was all the rage in sort of aristocratic circles sort of seances and Ouija boards and you know communicating with the dead and theosophy and there’s this sort of heady concoction of different mystical religious practices and ideas that are sort of swirling around.

But I do think that within the orthodox tradition there is a kind of reverence for holy figures who are sort of almost like the holy fool.

I mean someone who is blessed with a religious wisdom and these are individuals who are not necessarily ordained priests.

So when Rasputin arrives in St.

Petersburg he’s kind of this whirlwind but at the same time he’s not an unknown.

He arrives with the backing of important bishops.

So he has credentials but at the same time he’s unlike anything that these people have seen before.

Rasputin met these two sisters, Militza and Anastasia of Montenegro, who were not particularly popular amongst the other elite, but both these women were married to [music] cousins of the Zar.

So now Rasputin had had entered a sort of rarified atmosphere and it wasn’t very far from there to the Zar and Zarina themselves.

When Nicholas and Alexander were first introduced [music] to Rasputin in 1905, it was very much as a sort of wise guru and healer and man of God.

It was not as a miracle worker.

They were always interested in exploring their spiritual life and meeting people and they were very taken with Russin and Nicholas’s initial reaction was to him as [music] a man of God.

[cheering] When Nicholas and Alexandra meet Ras Putin, they meet him in the grip of a revolutionary crisis.

I mean, he’s a monarchist, Rasbutin.

I mean, he’s all in favor of the Zar needs to be the Zar.

Don’t worry about these reforms.

So, he’s telling them the kinds of things that they want to hear, but he seems to be this sort of representative of the common people.

The common people are beyond the palace.

They are rioting and attacking gentry estates.

This chaos is unfolding and here suddenly is this individual who is going to help us explain, you know, what’s going on and is and is telling us the kinds of things that we really want to hear because he reinforces our own views of the Russian peasantry.

The timing of the meeting really matters because they are in a moment of acute political crisis but also personal crisis because of the diagnosis of hemophilia in Alexi.

I think one of the most important things, the thing everybody knows in fact about Rasputin but still is really important to stress and was a big influence on people at the time was Rasputin’s looks and his physicality.

He was incredibly dramatic looking.

You know, he made a big impression on everybody he met.

There was something else about him which is interesting.

All the photographs of him show him being very very austere, [snorts] staring at the camera, very very serious.

But when people met him, he wasn’t really like that at all.

He was actually quite fun.

He was quite light-hearted.

He would tease people.

He would smile a lot.

When he met someone, he recognized he was incredibly happy.

He was joyful.

None of that comes across from the photographs.

He had a way that [music] made people want to befriend him or made them want to be important to him.

The first really significant episode in which Russian offered advice and supposed healing to Alex a came in 1907 when Alex [music] A had an accident in the park.

I think he banged his leg and he had a bout of serious bleeding into a joint and Alexander remembered that they’d met this wise guru healer Rasputin a couple of years ago Rasputin was called he stood at the end of the bed he said prayers and the boy recovered you can imagine the sort of effect this had on a Zarina he basically came stood at the end of the said said a prayer or two said don’t worry everything’s going to be okay and went there’s no mystique about it [music] I think the key with Rasputin is that he had the ability to calm this sort of auto suggestive power to calm Alexandra if the mother’s anxious the child the sick child becomes more anxious there’s a kind of transmission of anxiety And by calming Alexandra and convincing her that everything was going to be okay, that kind of reassurance transmitted itself to the little boy.

It’s very interesting question, very controversial question obviously whether there was any science behind um the fact that the bleeding stopped and Alex say improved.

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