Rasputin was born some 1,600 miles from what was then called St Petersburg, in the village of Pokrovskoe in western Siberia. The village was made up of several streets of spacious one-or two-storey wooden houses, with framed windows and carved, painted beams. It was very much an ordinary village, more prosperous perhaps and more lively than most since it was on both the road and the river. In 1915, the Petrograd newspaper Novoe Vremya, in an anti-Rasputin article, described Pokrovskoe as a poor village, a wretched foggy place, remote and wild, inhabited by Siberian zhigani or rogues. 3
Grigori Rasputin was the second son of Anna Egorovna and Efim Aklovlevich Rasputin, a carter and farmer. Maria Rasputina gave her father’s date of birth as 23 January 1871.4 By the pre-revolutionary Julian calendar, this date corresponds to 10 January. Rasputin’s exact date of birth has been an unresolved issue for over a century. Rasputin biographers have given a variety of dates ranging from the late 1860s through to the 1870s.5
During Soviet times, encyclopedias and reference books gave Rasputin’s date of birth as 1864/65. Contrary to the generally accepted view that no authoritative contemporary evidence of his birth exists, the answer is to be found in the Tyumen Archives.
According to a Pokrovskoe church register entry, Rasputin’s parents (his father was aged twenty and his mother twenty-two) were married on 21 January 1862.6 Birth registers indicate that between 1862 and 1867 six daughters were born, but all died in infancy.7 Eventually, on 7 August 1867, a son, Andrei, was born.8 The registers from 1869 have regrettably not survived. Before 1869 there is no mention of Grigori Rasputin’s birth in any of the registers. It can therefore be concluded that he could not have been born before 1869. However, this does not imply that it is impossible to establish Rasputin’s exact date of birth. A census of the population of the village of Pokrovskoe, also in the Tyumen Archive,9 contains the name Grigori Rasputin. In the column opposite his name is his date of birth – 10 January 1869, which happens to be St Grigori’s Day. This corresponds to the date given by Maria Rasputina, although she places the year as 1871 not 1869.10
Rasputin himself was also responsible for the variety of dates given as his date of birth. In a 1907 ecclesiastical file on an investigation into his religious activities,11 Rasputin declares that he is forty-two years of age, therefore implying that he was born in 1865. In a 1914 file on the investigation into an attempt on his life by Khiona Gusyeva, he declares, ‘My name is Grigori Efimovich Rasputin-Novy, fifty years old’,12 which implies 1864 as his year of birth. In the 1911 notebook belonging to Tsarina Alexandra,13 she recorded Rasputin as saying, ‘I have lived fifty years and am beginning my sixth decade.’This suggests he was born in 1861!
Reporters covering the murder of Rasputin at the time stated his age as being fifty. When, six months later, the new Provisional Government set up an Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry to examine Rasputin’s activities, evidence from witnesses who had known him in Siberia and elsewhere was collected by its chief investigator, E.P. Stimson, a respected lawyer from Kharkov. Stimson concluded that Rasputin was born in either ‘1864 or 1865’.14 Tsarina Alexandra referred to him as ‘elder’. He was in fact younger than the Tsar, and it was, perhaps, for this reason that he sought to inflate his age.
According to contemporary accounts,15 Rasputin’s father Efim was comparatively well-off in terms of Pokrovskoe peasants, who in turn had a better standard of living than the peasants in European Russia, who lived in chimneyless log huts. Efim’s single-storey cabin had four rooms – unlike many peasants, who used stretched animal bladders to cover their windows, Efim could afford glass. In later years, Rasputin proudly recalled that as a child he ate white bread rather than the brown bread suffered by peasants in European Russia – and fish and cabbage soup.16
Rasputin’s mother related that the young Grigori often ‘stared at the sky’ and at first she feared for his sanity.17 Stories abound about his developing powers as a youth – he seems to have had a way with animals and became a horse whisperer. Efim Rasputin had a favourite story18 of how his son’s gift first showed itself. Efim mentioned at a family meal that one of his horses had gone lame that day and could have pulled a hamstring. Grigori got up from the table and went out to the stable. Efim followed and saw Grigori place his hand on the animal’s hamstring. Efim then led the horse out into the yard – its lameness had apparently gone. According to his daughter Maria, Rasputin became a kind of ‘spiritual veterinarian’,19 talking to sick cattle and horses, curing them with a few whispered words and a comforting hand.
Stories also abound concerning Grigori’s supposed ability to discover missing objects. On one occasion, a horse was stolen. A village meeting was called to discuss the theft. Grigori pointed at one of the richest peasants in the village and declared him the guilty man. Despite his protests, a posse of villagers followed the man back to his homestead and discovered the stolen horse there. As a result, the man was given a traditional Siberian beating.
Rasputin’s daughter Maria later wrote that he could also predict the deaths of villagers and the coming of strangers to Pokrovskoe.20 Much of what Maria was to record in her book and published interviews is, however, very much open to question. For example, the Provisional Government Inquiry of 1917 found Pokrovskoe witnesses who had a somewhat different perspective on her father. ‘They note that Efim Rasputin drank vodka heavily,’ the investigator wrote. ‘As a boy Rasputin was always dirty and untidy so that boys of his age called him a “snotter.”’21
Maria’s claims concerning her father’s early life are typical of the retrospective accounts that have come to be accepted without question by many subsequent writers and researchers. It suited Rasputin’s retrospective image to establish that his gifts were evident during childhood. A number of Maria’s claims are very much open to question and are at variance with testimonies given by Pokrovskoe villagers.
In August 1877, when Grigori was eight years old, his ten-year-old brother Mischa died. The two brothers were swimming in the River Toura when Mischa was caught by a current, dragging Grigori with him. Although the two boys were pulled out by a farmer, Mischa contracted pneumonia and died shortly after.
At the age of nineteen, Grigori attended a festival at Abalatski Monastery, where he met a girl two years older than himself, named Praskovia Fyodorovna Dubrovina, from the nearby village of Dubrovnoye. Following a six-month courtship, they married. The precise date of their marriage is unknown, although the 1917 investigation believes it was 1889.22
Marriage seems to have had little impact on Grigori or his lifestyle. He continued to spend his evenings at the tavern. According to E.I. Kartavtsev, a neighbour of the Rasputins in Pokrovskoe, who was sixty-seven years old at the time of the 1917 investigation, he had ‘caught Grigori stealing my fence poles’.23 Kartavtsev went on to explain that,