![]()
CHAPTER ONE
The Siberian Who Crossed Several Boundaries
Birth and Marriage
The Pokrovskoye Church Register No.3, kept in the Tyumen District State Archives, reveals that Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin was born on 9 January 186916 in the settlement Sloboda Pokrovskoye. Father Nikolai Titov baptized the baby one day after his birth, on 10 January, and registered the names of both godparents: his uncle, Matvei Yakovlev Rasputin, and a local girl, Agafia Ivanovna Alemasova (DOCUMENT No. 1). Observing orthodox custom, the parents named their newborn son Grigorii after St. Gregorius Nyssenus,17 whose name was listed in the church calendar for that day. Grigorii’s parents, who had married in 1862, were Efim Yakovlevich and Anna Vasiliyevna. Though the family was not well off,18 the young couple had a dozen cows and eighteen horses on their own land.19 The Rasputin family could trace their origins in the local region as far back as the seventeenth century, and like many inhabitants, their origins derived from the same ancestors.
This Siberian community (eighty kilometers north of Tyumen) lies on the left bank of the Tura River. Tyumen, which was the first settlement built in Siberia, is 2,318 kilometers from Moscow by rail. Although Pokrovskoye lacked a railway, it was part of the ancient Siberian trail that linked the center of Russia with the most remote towns of Siberia. Tobolsk Museum records reveal this region enjoyed a robust cultural and economic lifestyle.20 It also had a darker side. Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy noted it as the area where political prisoners were exiled, the first of whom arrived in 1593.21 When local historian Vladimir Smirnov examined the Pokrovskoye records for the year 1869, he found that it was part of the commercial water-trading route, made up of 172 households, supporting close to one thousand inhabitants. The community offered a small school, a post office, an administration building that included the police, and its own church.22
The Rasputin surname is common in Siberia. It derived from the word rasputiye, which means “crossroads” and originated from the description given to the people of their community, who lived “at the parting of the roads,”23 which provided access to either Tyumen to the west or to Tobolsk in the northeast. Though the current custodian of the present Rasputin Museum, Marina Smirnova,24 accepted Matrena Rasputina’s explanation of her father’s surname, it was unfortunate that those who began to malign Grigorii sneered at it. Sounding similar, they preferred to link the surname with the word rasputsvo (debauchery).25 British Ambassador George Buchanan, like many others in St. Petersburg,26 supposed that the surname Rasputin was Grigorii’s nickname27 because of his alleged dissolute lifestyle. Few knew that the surname appears in the 1762 Tyumen Church Register.28 French author Henri Troyat, without the benefit of searching local church records, provided a third possible derivation for the Rasputin surname: the Russian word rasputivat, meaning “to disentangle.”29
Church records indicate that other than his sister Feodosiya, Grigorii (the fifth child) was the only one to survive to adulthood in his family. Not remarkable for that era, Grigorii’s mother experienced nine live births, but had to suffer the death of most of her children.30 Growing up as a typical villager, Grigorii’s education was non-existent. Initially, Grigorii helped his father tend the animals, while, as a living, Efim loaded goods on barges and river boats in summer, while driving carts in winter.31 As Grigorii matured, the church, with its traditions and observance of holy days and Lenten periods, swayed his outlook on life. It has been claimed that throughout his formative years, Grigorii favored discussing truth-seeking matters, rather than help tend his father’s animals.32 Soon enough, Efim grasped that Grigorii (who suffered ill health during his first twenty-eight years) was of no help to him, more so after Grigorii began to distinguish himself by reciting passages from the Bible. In future years, this familiarity enabled Grigorii to gain a favorable reputation among ordained clerics. In 1915, he was unjustly accused of stealing horses by the Tyumen newspaper Sibirskaya Torgovaya Gazeta (The Siberian Commercial Newspaper), which his daughter Matrena raised in her memoirs, saying the tale had evolved from her community’s bygone notoriety and that the label had stuck unjustly against her father. Rasputin sent the editor (Krylov) a telegram demanding immediate proof as to “where, when and from whom I stole horses?”33 In response, the editor retracted his accusation using a tiny font conceding that he had no proof.
The Church Register shows that on 22 February 188734, Grigorii, aged eighteen, married Paraskeva (Praskovya) Fyodorovna Dubrovina35 (Photo 2), who grew up in the adjacent settlement of Dubrovnoye, some nine miles east of Pokrovskoye. Similar to his father’s situation, Grigorii’s wife was older. Traditionally, village men preferred to marry younger girls for their strength to work in the fields and care for the home, rather than for their attractiveness.36 The couple met while they were both partaking their own pilgrimages at the Abalak Znamensky Monastery, which was located seventeen miles from Tobolsk.37 Grigorii courted Praskovya for half a year before their marriage.38 Records indicate Praskovya had seven live births. The first child, Mikhail, born on 29 September 1888, died from scarlet fever before his fifth birthday, on 16 April 1893. The last child, Paraskeva, was born in 1903 but died in the same year of her birth, on 20 December.39 Only three children survived into adulthood. When Efim Rasputin became a widower after his wife’s death on 30 January 1906, he continued to live in the outbuilding located next to Grigorii’s house on the family’s ...
