To What Extent Did Rasputin Cause The Russian Revolution?.
In order to explore this, one must know about Rasputin - his background, his values and his calling, as well as other factors contributing to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the murders of the Romanovs. I have tried to explore this while keeping focus on each event's relation to Rasputin.
Gregory Efimovich Rasputin is one of the most debated characters of the 20th Century. Thousands have discussed whether Rasputin was a holy man who came to the aide of the royal family or more simply, a cheat who thrived in womanising and destroying all that the Romanovs had worked so hard to build. In fact, the word "Rasputin" in Russian means "the debauched one". However, the facts in this essay speak for themselves.
In the winter of 1869 Grigorii Yfimovich Rasputin was born in the Siberian village of Pokrovskoye. Little is known or accessible of his background. His father, Yfimy, was a farmer, married to Anna. They already had an older son - Dimitri. Although later enemies alleged that Rasputin's surname was an insult, meaning "debauched" in Russian, it had been the family name for years, derived from the word for a fork in the road. Pokrovskoye perched on the banks of the Tura River in Tobolsk Province. It was a typical Russian peasant village where few if any were educated and the people were heavily religious and narrow minded. .
When Rasputin was eight years old, he suffered his first tragedy. He was playing with his older brother along the banks of the Tura when Dimitri fell and drowned. Shortly after this, Rasputin began to startle the villagers by making amazing predictions. In one incident, Rasputin caught a horse thief. As a teenager, Rasputin paid a visit to the local Monastery, where he encountered not only the Russian Orthodox Church he had known from his childhood but also a number of un-Orthodox sects. They held beliefs like "only through sin could one truly repent and receive God's grace," and "if a person studied long enough, it was possible to attain a semi-divine nature and escape earthly judgment" The discovery of these sects greatly changed Rasputin.