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In 1914 Anya Vyrubova incurs life-threatening injuries in a train wreck between Petersburg and Tsarskoe Selo. She is lying unconscious in the railroad guard booth with broken legs and a fractured skull. Rasputin approaches Anya. He is standing over her bed, his eyes are popping out of their sockets from the terrible strain, and suddenly he whispers gently: “Anyushka, wake up, look at me.” She opens her eyes.

How must Alix have felt about the person who resurrected the dead right before her very eyes! The only person who could save—and so many times already had saved—her son! Could Nicholas deprive her of her son’s healer? And her soul’s? Getting rid of Rasputin would mean killing her. And the boy.

So he suffered all of it. He even played along.

He acquiesced to Alix’s request to eat a miracle-working crust of bread from Rasputin’s table and comb his hair with his miraculous comb. Alix had a sacred belief in their miraculous power. He had to pretend that he too believed.

But Nicholas was not simply playing along. For him Grigory was the result of his own truth seeking, which began with Klopov, the destitute landowner who had become for a time Nicholas’s “man of the people,” and was now finding its culmination in a genuine muzhik in the palace. The union of “people and tsar” had come to pass. Naturally, he knew of Grigory’s debauchery. Unlike Alix, he did not try to construct any mystical justifications for him. He accepted it as the debauchery of the real people, proving yet again that his people were not ready for a constitution. Through this wildness he glimpsed in Grigory common sense, goodness, and faith. For him Grigory’s voice was the voice of the people.

“This is merely a simple Russian man, very religious and believing,” he explained to Count Fredericks, minister of the court. “The empress likes his sincerity, she believes in the power of his prayers for our Family and Alexei, but after all this is our own business, completely private. It is amazing how people love to interfere in all that does not concern them.”

People were interfering. In society people spoke with horror about the astounding ritual that had become the norm in the tsar’s palace: the Siberian muzhik kissed the hand of the tsar and tsaritsa and then they—the autocrat and empress—kissed the rough hand of the muzhik. This exchange of kisses was entirely evangelical: Christ had washed his disciples’ feet. And here they were, the rulers of Russia, humbly kissing the hands of a Siberian muzhik. The people. The tsar’s religious family and an increasingly atheistic society were finding they understood each other less and less.

Rasputin indisputably possessed a supernatural gift. For our century, accustomed to the dark miracles of parapsychologists, there is no mystery in this whatsoever. Still, Rasputin’s mystery did exist.

The mystery began with his strange behavior. His endless debauches, drinking, unbridled lust—all this became the talk of the town. Petersburg and Moscow saw him boozing outrageously in smart restaurants.

But why? He had an apartment guarded by the police where he could have indulged in drink and depravity to his heart’s content without provoking gossip or widespread indignation. But he preferred to carry on in full view of the entire country.

Perhaps there was a challenge in this: I, a simple muzhik, am above your official Petersburg magnificence, above all your proprieties. I’m dancing a mad dance, committing every kind of obscene act. Burn! Burn! What I want—I get!

This was a wholly self-conscious attempt to exploit the alleged mystery of the Russian soul for his own ends. Tolstoy plus Dostoevsky, a kind of banal Tolstoevsky—the symbol of the West’s perception of Russia.

There was something wrong with this image. A cunning muzhik with a stinging, guarded gaze. Everyone remarked on the intense guardedness of his eyes. So why this recklessness? What was his mystery?

One of his noisiest scandals occurred in 1915.