Contemporary Authors

• Working the Rough Stone: Freemasonry and Society in Eighteenth-Century Russia Northern Illinois University Press (DeKalb, IL), 1999
• Love and Conquest: Personal Correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin Northern Illinois University Press (DeKalb, IL), 2004
• The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 2008
• Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2013
• Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs Farrar, Straus and Giroux (New York, NY), 2016

1. Rasputin : faith, power, and the twilight of the Romanovs LCCN 2016027558 Type of material Book Personal name Smith, Douglas, 1962- author. Main title Rasputin : faith, power, and the twilight of the Romanovs / Douglas Smith. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Description xxv, 817 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm ISBN 9780374240844 (hardback) Shelf Location FLM2015 174261 CALL NUMBER DK254.R3 S66 2016 OVERFLOWJ34 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 2. Former people : the final days of the Russian aristocracy LCCN 2015452749 Type of material Book Personal name Smith, Douglas, 1962- Main title Former people : the final days of the Russian aristocracy / Douglas Smith. Edition First Picador edition. Published/Produced New York : Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. ©2012 Description xxi, 464 p. : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm ISBN 9781250037794 (pbk.) Shelf Location FLM2016 050668 CALL NUMBER HT653.S65 S65 2013 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) Shelf Location FLM2016 061801 CALL NUMBER HT653.S65 S65 2013 OVERFLOWJ34 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms (FLM2) 3. Former people : the final days of the Russian aristocracy LCCN 2012003819 Type of material Book Personal name Smith, Douglas, 1962- Main title Former people : the final days of the Russian aristocracy / Douglas Smith. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012. 2012 Description xvii, 464 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates ; illustrations, maps ; 24 cm ISBN 9780374157616 (alk. paper) CALL NUMBER HT653.S65 S65 2012 CABIN BRANCH Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 4. The Pearl : a true tale of forbidden love in Catherine the Great's Russia LCCN 2007045563 Type of material Book Personal name Smith, Douglas, 1962- Main title The Pearl : a true tale of forbidden love in Catherine the Great's Russia / Douglas Smith. Published/Created New Haven : Yale University Press, c2008. Description xiv, 328 p., [16] p. of plates : ill., (some col.), ports. ; 24 cm. ISBN 9780300120417 (alk. paper) 0300120419 (alk. paper) Links Table of contents only http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip084/2007045563.html Contributor biographical information http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0806/2007045563-b.html Publisher description http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0806/2007045563-d.html Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=31493 CALL NUMBER ML420.K875 S65 2008 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Performing Arts Reading Rm (Madison, LM113) - STORED OFFSITE CALL NUMBER ML420.K875 S65 2008 Copy 1 Request in Performing Arts Reading Room (Madison, LM113) 5. Love & conquest : personal correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin LCCN 2003027084 Type of material Book Personal name Catherine II, Empress of Russia, 1729-1796. Uniform title Correspondence. Selections. English Main title Love & conquest : personal correspondence of Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin / edited and translated by Douglas Smith. Published/Created DeKalb : Northern Illinois University Press, c2004. Description liv, 421 p. : ill., maps ; 24 cm. ISBN 0875803245 (cloth : alk. paper) Links Table of contents http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0412/2003027084.html CALL NUMBER DK170 .A2 2004 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER DK170 .A2 2004 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE 6. Working the rough stone : freemasonry and society in eighteenth-century Russia LCCN 98032115 Type of material Book Personal name Smith, Douglas, 1962- Main title Working the rough stone : freemasonry and society in eighteenth-century Russia / Douglas Smith. Published/Created DeKalb, Ill. : Northern Illinois University Press, 1999. Description x, 257 p. : ill. ; 24 cm. ISBN 087580246X (alk. paper) Links Book review (H-Net) http://www.h-net.org/review/hrev-a0b4m1-aa CALL NUMBER HS624 .S58 1999 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms CALL NUMBER HS624 .S58 1999 FT MEADE Copy 2 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms - STORED OFFSITE

• Douglas Smith - http://douglassmith.info/author/

  Author
  An award-winning historian and translator, Douglas Smith is the author of five books on Russia. His works have been translated into a dozen languages. He studied German and Russian at the University of Vermont, graduating summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and has a doctorate in history from UCLA.

  Over the past thirty years Douglas has made many trips to Russia. In the 1980s, he was a Russian-speaking guide on the U.S. State Department’s exhibition “Information USA” that traveled throughout the USSR. He has worked as a Soviet affairs analyst at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich, Germany, specializing in Russian nationalism, and once served as an interpreter for late President Reagan.

  Douglas has taught and lectured widely in the United States, Britain, and Europe and has appeared in documentaries for A&E, National Geographic, and the BBC. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions, including a Fulbright scholarship and a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Study Center.

  His book Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy was a bestseller in the UK. It won the inaugural Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2013, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week, and was chosen Book of the Year by Andrew Solomon in Salon.

  Listen to Douglas talk about Former People on KUOW Radio.

  His latest book, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs, was published in November 2016 in the US and the UK. The most complete biography ever written, Rasputin draws on long-lost documents from archives in seven different countries to overturn many of the old myths about the infamous Russian mystic, presenting Rasputin in a fascinating new light. Publishers Weekly calls it “Monumental and soul-shaking … written with a Dostoevskian flair for noir and obsession.”

  Born and raised in Minnesota, Douglas has lived in Vienna, London, and Moscow, and is now based in Seattle with his wife and two children.

• Pan Macmillan - https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/douglas-smith

  Douglas Smith

  Douglas Smith is an internationally recognized expert in Russian history and critically acclaimed author of several books, including the award-winning bestseller Former People (also published by Pan Macmillan). Before becoming a historian, Douglas Smith worked with the US State Department in the Soviet Union and as a Russian affairs analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in Munich. He lives in Seattle with his wife and two children.

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Print Marked Items
The eyes had it: pilgrim, mind­reader, lover and
crazed zealot­­rasputin unfrocked
Lucy Hughes­Hallett
New Statesman.
145.5343 (Dec. 2, 2016): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2016 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
Full Text:
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Rasputin
Douglas Smith
Macmillan, 817pp, 25 [pounds sterling]
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The first would­be murderer to land a blow on Grigory Rasputin was a peasant woman named Khioniya Guseva,
whose nose had been eaten away by a disease (not syphilis, she told her interrogators emphatically) and who had been
a devotee of Rasputin's rival Iliodor, the self­styled "Mad Monk". In June 1914 Guseva pursued Rasputin through
Pokrovskoye, the Siberian village that was his home, and stabbed him with a 15­inch dagger.
Rasputin recovered. From thenceforward, though, death dogged him. As confidant and adviser to the tsar and tsarina of
Russia, he was detested by monarchists and revolutionaries alike. By the time he was killed, two and a half years later,
myriad plots had been hatched against his life. The minister of the interior had tried sending him on a pilgrimage
accompanied by a priest: the priest had instructions to throw Rasputin from a moving train. A colonel in the secret
services planned to lure him into a car with promises to introduce him to a woman, then drive to an isolated spot and
strangle him. His madeira (Raputin's favourite drink) was to be poisoned. Peasants were bribed to lead him into
ambushes. A strange lady turned up at his flat (as strange ladies often did) and showed him a revolver: she had brought
it to kill him with, she told him, but had changed her mind after gazing into his eyes. No wonder that by the time
Prince Felix Yusupov invited him to come by night to the cellar beneath the Yusupov Palace Rasputin was suspicious
and fearful, and had all but given up the noisy, night­long parties he used to enjoy.
His legend has been recounted many times. The peasant who became an all­powerful figure at the Romanov court. His
priapic sexuality and his rumoured affair with Tsarina Alexandra. His "burning" eyes. His ability to hypnotise and
beguile. His gift for healing, which miraculously preserved the life of the haemophiliac heir, Tsarevich Alexei. His
devilish influence over the imperial couple that led them into repeated mistakes, eventually precipitating the 1917
revolution. His debauchery. His supernatural power, which obliged his murderers to kill him not once, but thrice with
poisoned pink cakes, with gunshots at point­blank range and eventually by drowning him. All of this, everybody who
knows anything about Russian history, and many who do not, have heard. Douglas Smith retells the story, pruning it of
absurdities, greatly expanding it, and demonstrating how very much more complicated it is than the legend would have
us believe.
Rasputin's public career began in his thirties, when he arrived in St Petersburg in 1905. Smith's account of his life
before his debut in the city is the most fascinating part of this book. It describes a world of isolated peasant
communities with few books (in 1900 only about 4 per cent of Siberia's inhabitants could read) but many holy men.
This is the world of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov: violent, physically harsh, but spiritually ecstatic.
At the age of 28, Rasputin ­ married with children, still living with his father and helping to farm the family's
smallholding left home to become a pilgrim. This was not an egregious decision. According to Smith, there were
"about a million" pilgrims crisscrossing Russia at the time, walking barefoot, begging for food and lodging, trudging
towards the holiest monasteries or seeking out revered starets, or church "elders".
Rasputin would be away from home for years at a time. He would walk 30 miles a day. For three years he wore fetters,
as many pilgrims did. After he laid them aside he went for six months without changing his clothes. He was often
hungry, either because he could get no food, or because he was fasting. He was repeatedly robbed by bandits. But, for
all his tribulations, on his return he would tell his children that he had seen marvels­­cathedrals with golden cupolas
and wild forests. He became part of a network of priests and visionaries which spanned the vast empire. He talked with
everyone he met on the road, acquiring a knowledge of the narod, the Russian people, that its rulers never had. Smith's
account of his wandering years conjures up a richness of experience that makes the way the nobility later sneered at the
"illiterate peasant", the "nobody" who had got hold of their tsarina, seem indicative not of Rasputin's shortcomings, but
of their own.
In 1905 Rasputin was in the Tatar city of Kazan, drinking tea with a famed healer called Father Gavril. He told Gavril
that he intended to walk on to St Petersburg, still hundreds of miles to the west. Gavril said nothing, but thought:
"You'll lose your way in Petersburg." Rasputin, who already had a reputation as a mind­reader, responded as though he
had heard, saying that God would protect him.
He was not the first holy man to be feted in the capital. Four years before he arrived in St Petersburg a French "sage"
called Monsieur Philippe was holding seances in the city, and had soon "enraptured" the royal family. Nicholas and
Alexandra prayed with Philippe and sat up until the small hours listening to him talk. They called him by the sobriquet
they would soon give Rasputin, "Our Friend", and they counted on him to guide the tsar in crucial talks with Kaiser
Wilhelm of Germany. Eventually Nicholas was prevailed upon to send him away, but other starets or "holy fools"
succeeded Philippe at court (including Mitya "the Nasal Voice", whose speech impediment made his words
incomprehensible but who was nonetheless credited as a prophet). Rasputin may have been exceptionally charismatic ­
­someone who met him soon after his arrival in the city described him as "a burning torch"­­but, as one of his sponsors
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in high society said, "our Holy Russia abounds in saints" and the ruling class was just as enthralled by them as were the
peasantry.
So, what was it about Rasputin? The eyes certainly­­there are numerous references in contemporary descriptions to his
"compelling", "mesmeric", "brilliant" eyes, their "strange phosphorescent light" and the way they stared, as though
penetrating another's mind. There were also his skills as a performer. He would talk eloquently and for hours. Smith
quotes some striking accounts of Rasputin at prayer. For him, prayer was not a matter of closed eyes and folded hands
and silent communion with God. It was a performance. He vibrated like a taut bowstring. He turned his face towards
heaven and then, "with great speed, he would begin to cross himself and bow".
He was all dynamic energy. He was unpredictable and frightening. His conversation could be bantering and light but
then he would turn on someone standing on the fringe of a party and, as though he had read her mind, begin to scold
her for having sinful thoughts. Then there was the erotic charge. In this compendious and exhaustively researched
book, Smith debunks dozens of untrue stories about his subject, yet there is no denying Rasputin's propensity for
stroking and kissing women he barely knew and (once he was sufficiently celebrated for this to become easy for him)
leading them into his bedroom and making love to them while people in the next room continued to drink their tea,
pretending not to hear the thumps and moans. He was "so full of love", he said, that he could not help caressing all
those around him. Alternatively, he claimed (and many of his devotees accepted) that his sexual activity was designed
to help his female followers overcome their carnal passions: he used sex to free them from sex. Smith treats this belief
as being probably sincerely held­­if almost comically self­justifying.
By the end of his life pretty well everyone in Russia believed that Rasputin was having an affair with the empress
Alexandra. Everyone, that is, except for Alexandra and her husband. She wrote to Rasputin that it was only when she
was leaning on his shoulder that she felt at peace; still, she could see nothing improper in their relationship. Tsar
Nicholas, coming home late at night, as he frequently did, to find his wife closeted alone with Rasputin, reacted only
with delight that "Our Friend" had blessed them with a visit. Rasputin was accused of "magnetism"­­of using a form of
hypnotism to dominate others. Whether or not he deliberately did so, he certainly had a magnetic personality.
Yet all these attributes are those of an individual. One of the important themes of Smith's book is that, remarkable
though Rasputin may have been, he could not on his own have brought down the tsarist autocracy, as his murderers
thought he had, or saved it, as the tsarina believed he could. He was seen as the heretic who was shaking the
foundations of the Orthodox Church, as the corrupter who had rendered the monarchy untenable, as the Satanic sower
of discord who broke the ancient and sacred ties that bound the narod to the tsar. He was seen as a peace lover who, as
one of his many biographers wrote in 1964, was the "only man in Russia capable of averting" the First World War.
Rasputin himself said that it was only his continued existence that kept the tsar on the throne.
When Rasputin's assassins dumped his body in the Neva, his mourning devotees took pailfuls of water from the icy
river, as though his corpse had made it holy, while all over Russia his enemies rejoiced. His murderers ­ Prince
Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitry and the rest ­ were hailed as the heroes who had saved the Romanov regime and
redeemed Holy Russia. But nothing changed. Two months after Rasputin's mauled and frozen body was dragged from
beneath the ice, the revolution began. The tsar abdicated, and the joke went around that now the royal flag was no
longer flying over the imperial palace, but only a pair of Rasputin's trousers.
Early on in the process of planning his book, Smith writes, he wisely decided that to confine himself to the facts would
be absurdly self­limiting. "To separate Rasputin from his mythology, I came to realise, was to completely
misunderstand him." In 1916 an astute observer of Russian politics noted in his diary that: "What really matters is not
what sort of influence Grishka [Rasputin] has on the emperor, but what sort of influence the people think he has" (my
italics). It's true, and Smith agrees. "The most important truth about Rasputin," he writes, "was the one Russians carried
around in their heads."
Smith, accordingly, gives us a plethora of rumours and canards. Over and over again in this book he tells a sensational
story, full of salacious or politically complex detail and drawn from an authoritative­sounding contemporary source,
only to show in the next paragraph that the story cannot possibly be true. As a result, we get an admirably
encyclopaedic account of the fantasy life of early­20th­century Russians, as well as a multifaceted image of the
Rasputin of their imagination. We do sometimes, though, get bogged down in the mass of material factual or fictional ­
being offered us. This book will be invaluable to all subsequent writers on the subject, but general readers may wish, as
I did, that Smith had at times allowed himself a clarifying generalisation rather than piling case history upon unreliable
memoir upon clutch of mutually contradictory reports. This is a richly illuminating book, but it is not a lucid one.
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At its centre is Rasputin, and for all the multiplicity of contemporary descriptions, and for all Smith's laudable
scholarship, he remains an area of darkness. By the time he came to fame he was no longer illiterate, but his own
writings are opaque and incoherent. It is hard to read the man between the lines. Photographs (there are some haunting
examples in here) seem to tell us more, but they are enigmatic.
Just occasionally, in this great, rambling edifice of a book, we glimpse him, as though far off down an endless corridor:
a young seeker, vibrating with energy and self­mortifying religious fervour; a charismatic celebrity, already talking as
he strides into a salon in the shirt an empress has embroidered for him; a hunted man walking home, tailed by a posse
of secret agents, and drinking himself into a stupor as he awaits the attack he knew was bound to come.
And yet, for the most part, despite Douglas Smith's herculean efforts, the man remains inscrutable. "What is
Rasputin?" asked the Russian journal the Astrakhan Leaflet in 1914. "Rasputin is a nothing. Rasputin is an empty
place. A hole!" Lucy Hughes­Hallett's books include "The Pike: Gabriele d'Annunzio­­Poet, Seducer and Preacher of
War" (Fourth Estate)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Hughes­Hallett, Lucy. "The eyes had it: pilgrim, mind­reader, lover and crazed zealot­­rasputin unfrocked." New
Statesman, 2 Dec. 2016, p. 42+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485989252&it=r&asid=6c8157f3fe830ba3cf8254438a2d9b92.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485989252
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How 'mad monk' Rasputin cast his spell
Patricia Treble
Maclean's.
129.47 (Nov. 28, 2016): p60.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
Full Text:
RASPUTIN
Douglas Smith
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
On Dec. 17, 1916, Grigori Efimovich Rasputin was poisoned, shot, left for dead and then, after crawling toward one of
his assassins, shot at again and finally dumped into an icy river in St. Petersburg. Or not. Such is the mythology that
surrounds him that even his murder is enveloped in layers of boasts and deceit.
On the 100th anniversary of his death, U.S. historian Douglas Smith has written a powerful biography­­a "dark fairy
tale" that follows Rasputin from his birth to illiterate peasants in rural Siberia, through his years as a religious pilgrim,
to his influence on the flawed, failing couple of Czar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra. It is an era and nation Smith
is familiar with: his previous book, Former People, focused on nobles who stayed in Russia after the Revolution.
For Rasputin, the author scoured diaries, letters, police files and archives to create the definitive portrait of a man
whose deeply held religious beliefs were often overshadowed by such debauchery and drunkenness that he's fixed in
the popular imagination as the "mad monk." It is a masterful display of storytelling. Smith introduces readers to
mesmerized aristocrats­­"His eyes pierced you like needles," said one divorcee­­as well as his long­suffering wife and
so many enemies that it's a miracle he survived until 1916. Rasputin's sexual avarice cut a swath through Russian
society as emotionally fraught women threw themselves on him.
His most important relationship was with the most important couple in Russia. From the start, Nicholas and Alexandra
were captivated by his religiosity and his counsel. Though Smith nixes speculation of a sexual link between the
empress and Rasputin, lurid speculation swirled about their relationship. Still, the royals refused to heed the advice of
family members and others to send Rasputin away, especially after he appeared to save the life of their hemophiliac
heir, Alexei.
Sometimes, Rasputin was as prescient as his legend suggests. In 1914, he warned Nicholas against war with Germany:
"This means ruin. Hard is God's punishment when he takes away reason, it's the beginning of the end." By 1916, more
than seven million Russian soldiers were dead, wounded or captured, Rasputin was killed and, in 1918, the czar and his
family were executed by vengeful revolutionaries.
Caption: 'Rasputin': The controversial Russian religious figure led a debaucherous and drunken life; he mesmerized
aristocrats with piercing eyes 'like needles'
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Treble, Patricia. "How 'mad monk' Rasputin cast his spell." Maclean's, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371739&it=r&asid=065de0b09f127d51688a4bcd0bbc8f03.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A472371739
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Magnetic and repellent
A.N. Wilson
Spectator.
332.9819 (Nov. 5, 2016): p36.
COPYRIGHT 2016 The Spectator Ltd. (UK)
http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Rasputin
by Douglas Smith
Macmillan, 25 [pounds sterling], pp. 817
When he first came to public notice, Rasputin was described in a Russian newspaper as 'a symbol. He is not a real
person. He is a characteristic product of our strange times.' With his hypnotic eyes, long hair and peasant simplicity,
Rasputin was as mesmerisingly attractive to upper­class and royal women in his 47 years of life, as, in afterlife he
would be for biographers.
Who can resist the story of the Siberian peasant, leaving his wife and nippers to wander the roads of Russia, imbibing,
and then dispensing, a mixture of spiritual truths and claptrap, and worming his way first into the salons of gullible St
Petersburg ladies and finally to the court itself? As Russia sleepwalked towards disaster, however, Rasputin­­
sometimes held to be a symptom, sometimes a cause of its sickness ­­was not to blame. Indeed, according to his latest
biographer, the distinguished historian Douglas Smith, there was actually a moment when Rasputin might have saved
Russia from itself.
This was on the eve of the first world war, when the wild­eyed charlatan of Pokrovskoye appealed directly to Nicholas
II: 'You are the Tsar Father of the People; don't allow the madmen to triumph and destroy themselves and the people.
Yes, they'll conquer Germany, but what of Russia?' Had Nicholas listened to Rasputin, Smith says, there would have
been no revolution, and the Romanovs would have died in their beds. As it was, they all­­including poor little Alexis,
the haemophiliac Romanov heir­­were shot by the Bolsheviks in Yekaterinburg. When they were stripped and hurled
into a mass grave, the only thing they had on them were the little amulets they wore round their necks, each bearing
Rasputin's image.
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Life at the top is lonely­­which is how and why world leaders often find themselves with surprising companions.
Queen Victoria had John Brown and Abdul Karim, and not everyone understood why. She was a fundmentally sensible
person, however, whereas Nicholas and Alicky (as her grandmother Victoria called her) were heartbreakingly thick.
Two years ago, Short Books published a truly excellent life of Rasputin by Frances Welch. It contained all that you
could possibly want to know about this fascinatingly unsavoury character; it was extremely funny; and it also spoke
volumes about Russia. The present book is a very different matter. Addicts of the Rasputin story will certainly be glad
of it, but it is pompous and verbose.
The author of a biography needs to ask how long a reasonable reader might wish to spend in the subject's company.
Rasputin was a grotesque phenomenon. He was, however, a skein of repellent simplicities which, stretching over
nearly 700 pages, becomes simply tedious. To read a book of this length at a sensible pace would take you a week.
Who wants to spend a week with Rasputin, with his ponderous mumbo­jumbo, his easy seduction of nursery maids and
religiously inclined Grand Duchesses? It does not seem, even from this exhaustive study, as if he ever said anything
remotely interesting.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
He was genuinely pious, leaving his life as a Siberian peasant to become a pilgrim, traipsing from place to place in
search of spiritual wisdom. Many found him plausible, which was how he managed to persuade the comparatively
reasonable cleric Feofan, rector of the theological seminary, to accept him into his house in St Petersburg, and how
Rasputin came to meet gullible salonnières, and eventually, the empress herself. There is no reason to doubt that his
ministrations to her son Alexis did have some efficacy. Whereas Welch sensibly points out that Rasputin calmed the
little boy, and that by reducing tension and blood pressure he probably did some good, Smith gives us several pages of
statistics about the numbers of American scientists and doctors who believe that prayer can actually cure disease.
Some readers will grow very tired­­I did­­of being told that previous biographers have got Rasputin wrong, or missed
some vital piece of evidence. Smith says that Rasputin's first letter written to Nicholas II 'has eluded previous
biographers', but it is in print; Smith did not discover it, nor is it especially interesting or significant. Another letter,
'overlooked by previous biographers', has been discovered by Smith in the St Petersburg state archive­­about an
investigation by the secret police into Rasputin's bizarre ritual practices. Was he a 'Khlyst', a heretic sectary who
practised mutilation and possibly sexually deviant activity? Probably not. The letter is actually totally unrevealing on
the subject, which is probably why previous biographers ignored it.
There is slightly more mileage in the chapter on the incident at the Yar restaurant in Moscow in 1915, but even here,
Smith is heavy­handed. That evening, as Rasputin fans will remember, was a convivial one, until Rasputin drank too
much and began some Trump­style sexual bragging, and name­dropping about his intimacy with the empress. As he
got carried away, not merely names but his trousers were also dropped, and Rasputin is said to have done a bit of
flashing. One of the witnesses was the British diplomat Robert Bruce­Lockhart. Smith is quite good at demolishing the
myth of the Yar restaurant. Bruce­Lockhart, he shows, was not even there. In the police report on the evening, there is
no mention of Rasputin being drunk, let alone making an exhibition of himself. The priapic show­off is the Rasputin in
whom we want to believe­­and so the myth was born.
Smith spreads the last two years of Rasputin's life over a very leisurely 300 pages. Yusupov's decision to murder
Rasputin is handled in a much earlier chapter of the book. By the time of the murder, we are on page 591. The emperor
has gone to the front. The poor demented empress is in sole charge of the government and relies more and more on
Rasputin for advice. Something had to be done to get rid of him. Even if he had been a saint, rather than the mixed bag
Smith depicts, and even if all of what his detractors said of him was false, the reader would now pay to have him put
down. Elizabeth David's repeated instruction with sauce­­'reduce'­­is one which windy biographers, who can easily
rattle off 5,000 words a day on the laptop, should take to heart.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Wilson, A.N. "Magnetic and repellent." Spectator, 5 Nov. 2016, p. 36+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468765763&it=r&asid=6ad8ba17d35c87f8fc5e12a34ec65772.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468765763
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Douglas Smith: RASPUTIN
Kirkus Reviews.
(Sept. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Douglas Smith RASPUTIN Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Adult Nonfiction) 35.00 11, 15 ISBN: 978­0­374­24084­4
On the centenary of his death, a vigorous attempt to penetrate the monstrous myths surrounding Grigory Yefimovich
Rasputin (1869­1916).A historian and translator concentrating on Russian history, Smith (Former People: The Final
Days of the Russian Aristocracy, 2012, etc.) grapples with the legend that grew around Rasputin during his life and
after his death. In this massive, winding journey, the author essentially concedes that Rasputin’;s mythmaking
after his gruesome murder in December 1916 by political intimates has become more important that the actual
events—;and most are disputed. The public excoriation of this “;simple”; devout Christian
peasant from Siberia, who nonetheless had the ear of the Romanov dynasty, became the key to undermining the
indecisive, rudderless leadership of Czar Nicholas himself. Rasputin was illiterate until his adulthood, facing a life as a
hardscrabble farmer, fond of the bottle, married at age 18 to Praskovya, a woman devoted to him and the mother of his
children. He was like most Russian souls at the time, “;keeping the eternal rhythm of peasant life in
motion.”; Yet he was restless and touched by a religious vision; he set off on pilgrimages in his late 20s to
become a “;holy seeker,”; a spiritual awakening that the author describes as certainly sincere. Further
along in this overly long narrative, Smith shows how Rasputin’;s fame as a “;starets”; (a
kind of captivating pious elder) spread and the circles of his acquaintances grew ever wider, encompassing the
aristocracy and the court of Nicholas and Alexandra. The royal couple desperately needed him to direct the tumultuous
country and heal their hemophiliac son. Smith demonstrates how gradually the mystic lost his way in the flashy capital
of St. Petersburg and was corrupted by the rapture he inspired. At the same time, he preached the importance of
disdaining wealth and status to his numerous devotees, especially wives and widows. A tour de force of research from
the Russian archives, the book is a deeply detailed, occasionally plodding biography of one of history’;s most
malleable characters.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Douglas Smith: RASPUTIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215980&it=r&asid=aa5b459e69d89fce4b19e67d4e611698.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
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Smith, Douglas. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the
Twilight of the Romanovs
Jessica Bushore
Library Journal.
141.16 (Oct. 1, 2016): p92.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
* Smith, Douglas. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. Farrar. Nov. 2016.832p. illus. maps,
notes, bibliog. index. ISBN 9780374240844. $35; ebk. ISBN 9780374711238. HIST
Coinciding with the centenary of Grigory Rasputin's (1869­1916) murder, Smith (Former People: The Final Days of
the Russian Aristocracy) stuns with a scrupulously exhaustive biography of the monk's role in the Russian empire's
downfall and the rise of Bolshevism. An omnipresent figure in pop culture, Rasputin's true story is cloaked in
conjecture. Smith seeks to "track Rasputin through time, to drag him ... down into the quotidian banalities of daily
life." To this end, his dedication to extricating Rasputin's experience from newly available Soviet Union primary
sources and international archives surpasses all previous academic works in breadth and scope, including Joseph
Fuhrmann's highly regarded Rasputin: The Untold Story. Smith presents a comprehensive analysis of Rasputin and his
significant influence on the Romanovs, illuminating his prescient prophecy, "When I die, Russia will perish." In
criticism, the minutiae of constantly changing political appointments on top of a cast of dozens if not hundreds are
overwhelming. VERDICT This account of the intertwined fates of Rasputin, the Romanovs, and Russia will be a true
challenge for nonacademics. Yet, Smith's study will surely be considered the seminal scholarly work on Rasputin, an
essential read for students of Imperial Russia's downfall. [See Prepub Alert, 5/23/16.]­­Jessica Bushore, Xenia, OH
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Bushore, Jessica. "Smith, Douglas. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs." Library Journal, 1 Oct.
2016, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464982294&it=r&asid=3ffb9fdef50d1de734a68617d1282fd0.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464982294
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Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the
Romanovs
Brad Hooper
Booklist.
113.4 (Oct. 15, 2016): p14.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
* Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs. By Douglas Smith. Nov. 2016. 832p. Farrar, $35
(9780374240844). 947.08.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
The "holy man" who drove the Romanov dynasty into the ground is the common take on the unkempt Russian monk
who rose spectacularly through Saint Petersburg society to sit at the side of the emperor and empress. Rasputin
reputedly offered the monarchs spiritual and even political guidance as the heir to the throne continued to fail in health
(suffering from hemophilia) and the seams holding the Russian Empire together threatened to burst open. Historian
Smith (Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, 2012) performs a nearly miraculous feat himself in
this amazingly detailed, deeply researched biography ("Russian archives have finally begun to give up their secrets").
He carefully lifts the myths away from the real story, which nevertheless is presented here as a greatly compelling
picture of a figure who at the zenith of his influence was known all over Russia, ultimately becoming "possibly the
most recognized name in Russian history." To get to the most truthful understanding of Rasputin's consequence, Smith
advocates viewing him through a prism of what people at the time believed he was up to rather than what he was
actually doing. Devil or saint? Smith steers a realistic course between those poles.­­Brad Hooper
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Hooper, Brad. "Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 14. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771213&it=r&asid=e77584165fba229a0ea3e8805c68abcd.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A468771213
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Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics
Robert Legvold
Foreign Af airs.
95.6 (November­December 2016): p186.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.
http://www.foreignaffairs.org
Full Text:
In Wartime: Stories From Ukraine
BY TIM JUDAH. Tim Duggan Books, 2016, 288 pp.
It is no small trick to convey what life is like for ordinary Ukrainians, particularly in the towns and villages where the
detritus of the past remains piled high and left largely undisturbed because of the corruption that still prevails. It is
more difficult still to capture the cruel mix of desolation, monotony, resignation, and pain experienced by those who
remain in areas laid waste by the civil war that has raged in eastern Ukraine since 2014. Judah succeeds by traveling to
these often out­of­the­way communities, poking around neighborhoods and museums, starting conversations with the
people he meets, and interviewing local notables, knaves, quiet heroines, and people who are simply coping. From
Lviv, in the heavily Polish­influenced west, to Bessarabia, a backwater to the south, to the epicenter of the war, in the
Donbas, he reveals the links between the current conflict and the history lying beneath the emotions and memories that
divide Ukrainians, brought to a sharp and ragged edge by the war.
The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev's Freedom to Putin's War
BY ARKADY OSTROVSKY. Viking, 2016, 384 pp.
Ostrovsky builds his book around two powerful contentions. First, he claims that from Soviet days to today's Russia,
mass media have been key to the system, and controlling them is the beginning and end of power. Second, he argues
that Vladimir Putin's Russia lacks a strategic vision and is driven only by the conviction "that strength [lies] in money,
that there [is] no such thing as values, and that the only difference between Russian and Western officials [is] that
Western ones [can] hide their cynicism better." Regardless of whether a reader accepts these propositions, he or she
will admire Ostrovsky's eye­opening revelations about the role that media figures have played in shaping and
controlling the images that have defined the Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and Putin eras. Ostrovsky makes a convincing case
that the perversity of contemporary Russia is not an aberration but rather the logical result of the self­deception and
misplaced hopes and ideals of the Gorbachev period, the flawed reforms and surging corruption of Boris Yeltsin's time
in power, and the crude statism and nativism that have added to even greater corruption in the Putin era.
The New Russia
BY MIKHAIL GORBACHEV. Polity, 2016, 400 pp.
Gorbachev here offers a detailed account of his thoughts, actions, and concerns from the day he resigned as president
of the Soviet Union, in 1991, until today. The emotions on display are a mix of anger (giving way to undisguised
hatred in the case of his successor, Boris Yeltsin), defiance, and sadness. Throughout, Gorbachev defends what he
accomplished with perestroika at home and "new thinking" in foreign policy. He had hopes for Vladimir Putin, and at
the outset of the Putin era, he excused a degree of authoritarianism as necessary and praised the new president's
agenda. Even when the Putin regime began to veer from the democratic path that Gorbachev had passionately
defended, he blamed "the government" or "state authorities" rather than Putin himself­­until roughly 2011, when his
despair became comprehensive. On the Ukrainian crISIS, Gorbachev punts, simply exhorting all parties to come
together and find a solution. Despite his loosely formulated, sometimes backward­looking ideas, it is hard not to come
away from this memoir thinking that Russia would be better off today if it were following Gorbachev's instincts.
Familiar Strangers: The Georgian Diaspora and the Evolution of Soviet Empire
BY ERIK R. SCOTT. Oxford University Press, 2016, 352 pp.
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Scott argues that the experience of Georgians who have made their way in Russia reveals the Soviet empire's uniquely
multiethnic quality. Rather than think of the Soviet Union as a checkerboard of territorial units with Russia at its core,
one could better understand it as "an empire of mobile diasporas that... helped construct a truly multiethnic society,"
Scott writes. He explores what it meant to be Georgian outside the borders of Georgia, distinct in one's nationality but
also viewing oneself as an integral citizen in the Soviet project. He draws comparisons not only with other nationalities
in the Soviet mix but also with the experiences of other empires and the United States. But his focus is on the evolving
role of the Georgian diaspora: its early contributions to revolutionary politics; its growing cultural prominence,
particularly in cuisine, in the 1930s; its place in post­Stalin arts and entertainment; its role in sustaining the "informal
economy"; and, ultimately, its struggle to adapt when its home base was sliced away from Russia after the collapse of
the Soviet Union.
Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs
BY DOUGLAS SMITH. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016, 832 pp.
What could justify another biography of the Russian mystic and adviser to the Romanovs, so famous that theatrical
works and musicals feature him and bars, restaurants, and nightclubs are named after him? Smith acknowledges that
this ground has been plowed many times, but he argues that the mystery of Rasputin remains. Smith does not pretend
to have produced a definitive portrait; nevertheless, he renders in great detail the ten years that Rasputin spent on the
national stage, from 1906 until his murder in 1916. Sorting through the Rasputin mythology, Smith discards the
apocryphal and weighs the plausible, balancing the extraordinary mix of mysticism and debauchery that made the
peasant monk notorious. Digging through countless and often conflicting firsthand accounts and impressions, Smith
gives Rasputin's mystique a depth and a fine edge missing from prior histories. In the end, readers themselves must
decide whether Rasputin was a holy man with hypnotic powers or merely a charlatan. But Smith goes a long way
toward making him more intelligible by exploring the fascination polite society had with the occult and the demonic
during imperial Russia's final, fateful decade.
Russia's Path Toward Enlightenment: Faith, Politics, and Reason, 1500­­1801
BY G. M. HAMBURG. Yale University Press, 2016, 912 pp.
Among the venerable intellectual histories of Russia that have been written over the last two centuries, this massive,
sweeping book represents the premier contribution of the current era. Hamburg is exceedingly ambitious, attempting to
synthesize two periods that are normally divided: the two centuries before the era of Peter the Great (which lasted from
1682 to 1725) and the century or so that followed. The first period was defined by ideas about authority, righteous rule,
and social virtues that originated in the Russian Orthodox Church. By Peter's time, Russian thinkers­­many of them in
or near government­­were still defending autocracy, but some had also begun promoting norms and institutions that
would create a more modern state, with a semblance of the rule of law and a relationship between church and state
based on religious tolerance. This trend culminated during the so­called Russian Enlightenment, which took place
during the reign of Catherine the Great, in the second half of the eighteenth century. What makes Hamburg's treatment
so original is the way he reveals the continuity in the complex mergers between church and state that took place across
the centuries and his demonstration of how European thought echoed in Russia, even before Peter and Catherine, but
without undoing the core link between religious faith and politics.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Legvold, Robert. "Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics." Foreign Af airs, Nov.­Dec. 2016, p. 186+. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477460857&it=r&asid=b5b426b7774af1d8b034dc74a78ca8ec.
Accessed 10 June 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477460857

Hughes­Hallett, Lucy. "The eyes had it: pilgrim, mind­reader, lover and crazed zealot­­rasputin unfrocked." New Statesman, 2 Dec. 2016, p. 42+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485989252&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017. Treble, Patricia. "How 'mad monk' Rasputin cast his spell." Maclean's, 28 Nov. 2016, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA472371739&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017. Wilson, A.N. "Magnetic and repellent." Spectator, 5 Nov. 2016, p. 36+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468765763&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017. "Douglas Smith: RASPUTIN." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Sept. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463215980&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017. Bushore, Jessica. "Smith, Douglas. Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs." Library Journal, 1 Oct. 2016, p. 92. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464982294&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017. Hooper, Brad. "Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs." Booklist, 15 Oct. 2016, p. 14. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA468771213&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017. Legvold, Robert. "Eastern Europe and Former Soviet Republics." Foreign Af airs, Nov.­Dec. 2016, p. 186+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477460857&it=r. Accessed 10 June 2017

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/06/rasputin-douglas-smith-review-myth-murder-russia-mad-monk-biography-romanovs
  Word count: 824

  Rasputin review – how myth and murder created a Russian legend
  Douglas Smith’s biography presents a fascinating, if far less sensational, portrait of Russia’s ‘mad monk’
  Grigori Rasputin and some of his followers in 1911.
  Grigori Rasputin holds court among some of his high society followers in 1911. Photograph: Topical Press Agency/Getty Images
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  Rodric Braithwaite
  Sunday 6 November 2016 07.00 EST Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 13.34 EDT
  Douglas Smith, the author of a substantial, meticulously researched and fluently written new life of Rasputin, calls it “possibly the most recognised name in Russian history”.

  Everyone knows the story: Rasputin the mad monk; Rasputin the insatiable satyr; Rasputin the faith healer who bewitched a hysterical empress; Rasputin, whose crazed advice destroyed an empire; Rasputin the indestructible, who survived poison, bullets and the freezing river his assassins threw him into; Rasputin, whose very name in Russian means something akin to “libertine”.

  The reality as set out by Smith is, of course, less sensational and rather more interesting. Rasputin, a peasant from Siberia, was married with children. In 1892 he decided to devote himself to the life of a religious traveller, like some figure out of Dostoyevsky. He began to acquire the aura of a holy man, and impressed those who met him with his piety and spiritual gifts. At Kazan on the Volga he made the contacts that led him to St Petersburg.

  Rasputin
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  Rasputin: ‘He died like any other man.’ Photograph: Popperfoto/Getty Images
  There he was seduced. He became a lion in the salons, which had so often run after fashionable mystics in the past. In November 1905 – with Russia gripped by revolution – he met the imperial family. Within days, according to a letter unearthed by Smith, he was addressing the tsar on matters of national policy. He soon became an intimate associate. The empress was convinced of his ability to calm, if not cure, her haemophiliac son. Rumours seeped into the public: that Rasputin was increasingly interfering in matters of state; that he was systematically seducing some of the highest women in society.

  The rumours became much more vicious with the outbreak of the first world war. The tsar was said to be taking his advice on military matters. Empress Alexandra – originally a German princess – was said to be consorting with the enemy. Obscene stories and cartoons began to circulate about her and Rasputin. People in high places muttered that he should be done away with.

  Rasputin was an extraordinary but minor figure. He contributed little to the tragedy that was to engulf Russia
  Smith has picked apart the sensational myths of Rasputin’s murder. Some facts are clear. Rasputin went to the palace of Prince Felix Yusupov for a late supper on 16 December 1916. Present were Yusupov, the tsar’s nephew Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and a senior monarchist politician, Vladimir Purishkevich. One or more of them shot Rasputin. The third bullet, to the head, was fatal and he was dead when they threw him in the nearby river. The autopsy showed that Rasputin had taken no poison and there was no water in his lungs. He had died like any other man.

  The imperial family were distraught. Alexandra arranged for the body to be buried near her summer palace, but it was dug up and destroyed when the 1917 revolution began. The murderers were questioned by the police, but suffered no serious discomfort.

  The Romanovs: masterful account of Russia’s doomed royal family
  Read more
  A fascinating subplot is the role of British ambassador George Buchanan, who did what little he could to avert disaster. Buchanan spoke to the tsar with a freedom few ambassadors would risk today. “I begged his majesty to forgive my frankness… [He] was at the parting of the ways. One road led to victory and a glorious peace – the other to revolution and disaster.” But he knew the tsar was dully incapable of changing course. Russians love conspiracy theories and many are convinced British secret agents were behind Rasputin’s murder. It is wholly unlikely. Smith has searched the files and found nothing convincing.

  Rasputin was an extraordinary but minor figure. He contributed little to the tragedy that engulfed Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century. Far more important were a grossly incompetent monarch in the shape of Nicholas II, a ruthless revolutionary in the form of Lenin, and a world war that the Russian government was no more able to avert than any other. All combined to bring down a nation that, if left to itself, might perhaps have become what so many Russians have hoped for, a “normal” and prosperous country.

  Rasputin is published by Macmillan (£25). Click here to order a copy for £20.50

• New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/29/books/rasputin-biography-douglas-smith.html?_r=0
  Word count: 1492

  ‘Rasputin’ Unravels the Myths of the ‘Mad Monk’
  Books of The Times
  By STEVEN LEE MYERS DEC. 29, 2016
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  From the opening pages of his colossal biography of Grigory Rasputin, the historian Douglas Smith dismantles many of the myths enshrouding the monk who exerted inordinate influence over Nicholas II and Alexandra, emperor and empress of Russia, during the twilight of the Romanov dynasty a century ago.

  His surname did not derive from the Russian word for reprobate. He was not a youthful horse thief, though he once spent two days in jail for being rude to a local bureaucrat. He did not expose his (legendarily large) penis after a night of debauchery in a Moscow restaurant in 1915.

  He could not have been the illegitimate father of Alexei, the emperor’s only son and heir, as rumored. Nor was he the source of the prayers Alexandra fervently believed made Alexei’s birth possible.

  Over and over in “Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs,” Mr. Smith argues that almost everything you might know about the “mad monk” — the hypnotic, wild-eyed, sex-crazed Rasputin of books, films, plays and a horrifying ’70s disco song by Boney M. — was based on rumor, hearsay and outright fabrications by enemies.

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  The propagation of “fake news” for political purposes, one is reminded again reading Mr. Smith’s book, did not begin with the reign of Vladimir Putin. “The Rasputin Russians thought they knew had been nothing but a ‘fantasy,’ yet a dangerous fantasy that proved poisonous to the throne,” Mr. Smith writes, summarizing the findings of an inquiry conducted by the provisional government that briefly ruled before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917.

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  Douglas Smith Credit Robert Wade
  It is to Mr. Smith’s credit that even in debunking so many of the most colorful myths — and at Tolstoyan length — he has not written a dull book. Only occasionally does he bog down in academic quibbles with previous biographers or tortured reasoning (citing, at one point, recent scientific studies about the curative power of prayer).

  In Mr. Smith’s telling, Rasputin was neither a sinner nor a saint, and very much a product of his time. He was born in Siberia in 1869, and very little is known about his early life, which “helped to make possible the invention of all sorts of tall tales.” He seemed destined to live a typical peasant’s life until he underwent a religious conversion at 28 — either to overcome drunkenness or, by his own account, insomnia and bed-wetting.

  He became a traveling pilgrim, and though not trained or ordained as a priest, he began to attract acolytes with his earthy wisdom and fluency with Scripture. His most devoted followers were women, with whom he seemed overly intimate, kissing and stroking their hands, and accompanying them to public bathhouses.

  His pilgrimages ultimately took him to St. Petersburg, which was in the thrall of the occult and the supernatural. Séances were a fad; so were hypnotism, chiromancy and telepathy. This search for spirituality coincided with a growing belief in “Dark Forces” haunting a country in the midst of profound change at the turn of the 20th century.

  Nicholas and, especially, Alexandra were not immune. Rasputin was not the first “healer” whose influence they fell under. A French charlatan, Philippe Nazier-Vachot, conducted séances for the royal couple, and for a time convinced them of his ability to predict the future. They believed he helped them conceive Alexei, who was born in 1904.

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  They first met Rasputin a year later: “We made the acquaintance of a man of God,” Nicholas recorded dryly but mystically in his diary. While much has been made of Rasputin’s ability to treat — or at least console — Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia, Mr. Smith argues that the monk provided succor about the state of Russia as much as the state of the heir.

  “With the country rebelling around them, here came a humble peasant who told Nicholas just what he wanted to hear — of the need to trust in God and his miracles, to be the rightful master of Russia, and to demand submission and obedience in his subjects, for the health of the tsar was inseparable from the health of Russia,” Mr. Smith writes.

  Rasputin’s scandalous behavior with society ladies and prostitutes, his unseemly intimacy with the royal family, and his influence over policies and appointments (though Mr. Smith also points out where that influence was most likely exaggerated) had the effect of eroding the authority of the czar. The gossip that Rasputin and Alexandra were lovers, for example, was unfounded but so widespread that postcards depicting them in sexual trysts openly circulated.

  Nicholas was repeatedly warned, but would hear none of it. He appreciated the calming effect Rasputin had on his anxious wife and ailing son. “Better ten Rasputins,” he told his prime minister, Pytor Stolypin, “than one of the empress’s hysterical fits.” Once the aura of the czar was punctured, though, revolution became inevitable.

  Mr. Smith can seem too forgiving of his subject at times. He explains away behavior that, even if exaggerated, was nonetheless horrendous, including accusations of rape. He dismisses Rasputin’s crude endorsement of vigilantism against Jews — so they “won’t even dream about asking for equality” — as an isolated utterance. He acknowledges Rasputin’s personal ambition, but does not dwell on his evident avarice or scheming.

  Rasputin was deeply reviled, after all. When he was assassinated in December 1916 — by members of the court, no less — Nicholas’s own mother cheered the news. So did the Church. “It says much about Russia in 1916,” Mr. Smith writes, “that many Russian Orthodox clergy not only approved of the murder, but actually blessed it.”

  His assassins acted in hopes of saving the czar — and themselves — but the conspiracy backfired. The murder inflamed the popular outrage that was already seething because of the losses and hardship of World War I. Nicholas abdicated barely two months later.

  He and Alexandra never lost faith in Rasputin, though. Alexandra told Nicholas that Rasputin continued to pray for him from the afterlife. “There he is yet nearer to us,” she wrote to her husband. And when the Bolsheviks executed the czar and his family and disposed of the bodies, the four daughters — Olga, Tatiana, Maria and Anastasia — each wore an amulet bearing a prayer and a picture of Rasputin.

  The dynasty followed the monk to its grave.

  Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs
  By Douglas Smith
  Illustrated. 817 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.

  A version of this review appears in print on December 30, 2016, on Page C25 of the New York edition with the headline: Unraveling the Myths of the ‘Mad Monk’ of Russia. Today's Paper|Subscribe

  Continue reading the main story

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  Books of The Times

• Los Angeles Review of Books
  https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/making-man-mad-monk/
  Word count: 1751

  Making a Man of the Mad Monk
  By Boris Dralyuk

  233 0 3

  NOVEMBER 23, 2016

  IN A SMALL CEMETERY in the Pico-Union district of Los Angeles, some five miles from the humble two-story Craftsman home in Silver Lake where she had spent the last years of her life, an obscure Russian émigré rests in eternal peace. She had fled Soviet Russia in 1920, at the age of 22, and for the next six decades led the peripatetic, unhappily exotic life of the exile. Her winding road to Los Angeles included stints as a performer in Parisian cabarets, a lion tamer with a traveling circus, and a riveter in a Miami shipyard. At the time of her death in 1977, one could still hear Russian spoken in the streets of Silver Lake on any day of the week — not just on Sunday mornings near the Holy Virgin Mary Cathedral on Micheltorena.
  She knew royalty. Few if any of the other Russian retirees in 1970s L.A. had ever glimpsed the Romanovs, much less set foot in their palaces. Those who could claim some connection to the throne, like the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, had died long ago. Even the great pretender Michael Romanoff, a Brooklyn textile worker turned Beverly Hills restaurateur, was gone from the scene. But the woman who lies at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery had not only met the emperor and empress, she had grown up alongside their girls. Maria Rasputin was the daughter of the Rasputin. She was the flesh-and-blood offspring of a creature more myth than man.
  OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
  Everyone knows the “Mad Monk” Rasputin. But how many know that the man left behind a devoted wife and three children — an odd legacy for any monk, mad or otherwise? For me, the very sight of Maria Rasputin’s grave restored some semblance of humanity to her father’s mythic story.
  Douglas Smith’s magisterial new biography does that same work on a far grander scale. This balanced, impeccably researched book is a revelation, as richly detailed and engrossing as any novel, but not particularly “novelistic,” in the crudest sense of the term. Unlike most of his predecessors — and they are legion — Smith never stoops to the tricks of fiction, the commonplaces of the potboiler. To have done so would have undermined his mission. There are no breathless accounts of wild orgies, magnetic seductions, or miraculous healings. Secondhand reports of Rasputin’s nefarious exploits abound, but each is scrupulously fact-checked, and, more often than not, dismissed. Smith brings forth an image of the human Rasputin — still uncertain, still inconclusive, but free of obvious falsehoods — slowly, as if freeing a sculpture from a block of stone.
  That stony myth around Rasputin is well-established: a priapic, depraved Svengali heals a young prince and gains control over the boy’s desperate parents — seducing the mother, befuddling her feckless spouse. His manipulation brings a mighty empire to its knees; he is ambushed and killed, after putting up a superhuman struggle, by a camarilla of patriotic Russian aristocrats; and his death appears to foretoken, if not precipitate, a revolution. The story lends itself all too easily to the Hollywood treatment. In fact, as Smith reports, it took its first turn on the silver screen before Hollywood had gotten on its feet. One of the more fascinating peripheral characters in the book is Sergei Trufanov (1880–1952), an extravagantly psychopathic former Hieromonk (under the name Iliodor), who first befriended Rasputin, then set out to destroy him, along with the Romanov dynasty and the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1917, Iliodor found himself in the States, “blinded by the bright lights of Fort Lee, New Jersey, America’s original Hollywood.” He spent his days drumming up publicity for his memoir and “consulting for, and even acting in, Herbert Brenon’s film The Fall of the Romanoffs, which debuted at New York’s Broadway Theatre in late September 1917 for a two-week engagement, and also in Maurice B. Blumenthal’s The Tyranny of the Romanoffs.”
  romanoffs
  One of the many ironies in Rasputin’s story is that his lingering epithet, the “Mad Monk,” was originally the title of his sworn enemy’s autobiography:
  The Mad Monk of Russia, Iliodor. Life, Memoirs, and Confessions of Sergei Michailovich Trufanoff was finally published in New York in 1918. […] Iliodor dedicated the book to “my good friend” Herbert Brenon, his new patron in the entertainment business. For many years The Mad Monk was the source for the story of Rasputin and his life. Along with the memoirs of Felix Yusupov, Rasputin’s killer, it has done more to shape the public perception of Rasputin than any other work. Yet Iliodor’s book, to quote [the poet] Alexander Blok, no apologist for Rasputin, was nothing but “loathsome.” Reading it left him feeling ill. […] For Maria Rasputina, Iliodor’s book amounted to “a tissue of the most outrageous slanders that have ever been conceived.” A fair assessment.
  Fair indeed — and just as fitting when it comes to The End of Rasputin, which the far more sophisticated but no less psychopathic Prince Felix Yusupov published in Paris in 1927. The chapters Smith devotes to Yusupov and his murderous plot turn one’s stomach. There is no romance, no splendor in his act, only bloodlust and self-delusion. Smith gives us by far the most accurate account of Rasputin’s gruesome end, down to the last detail. And the most telling detail, to my mind, concerns the backgrounds of the conspirators:
  At a meeting with [the virulently anti-Semitic] Purishkevich on the twenty-first [of November 1916], Yusupov recruited the fifth member of the plot. After hearing his speech, Yusupov felt certain Purishkevich would join them, and he wanted to include a politician among their members. He wrote in his memoirs that he felt it “important that members of all classes should participate in this momentous event.” Dmitry was a member of the ruling family; he and his mother were nobles; Sukhotin, an officer, and so Purishkevich as a politician, Yusupov reasoned, completed the picture. Amazingly, neither the vast peasant class — the largest social group in Russia — nor the smaller, but growing middle and working classes even registered in Yusupov’s mind as part of the equation.
  For all the talk of seduction, depravity, and treason, Rasputin’s greatest crime was, it seems, to have been born a peasant with ambitions. The speed with which he had clambered up the social ladder, all the way into the throne room, left the country baffled. How did this happen? It had to have been his sexual prowess, or the work of “dark forces.” His growing philosemitism didn’t help matters. Here is another — and far profounder — irony in Rasputin’s story: superstition and mystical thinking, which had secured him the royal couple’s confidence, also fueled the frenzied reaction to his rise. The crumbling Russian Empire that emerges in Smith’s pages is distinctly pre-secular. It is also — in the parlance of today’s political analysts — distinctly post-factual.
  From about 1908 until his death, Rasputin was the subject of near-constant surveillance. His code name in the Okhrana (secret police) files was first “The Russian,” then “The Dark One.” An agent’s report from 1912 reads: “‘The Russian’ […], when he is walking alone, particularly in the evening, talks to himself, waves his arms around, and slaps himself about the torso, which attracts the attention of passers-by.” Smith comments:
  If these details are indeed accurate it should not be too surprising, for the pressure on Rasputin continued to mount and the scandals continued to grow […]. Throughout it all the press and the police had never left him alone. Rasputin was being hunted like an animal.
  The countless investigations into Rasputin’s behavior were indeed witch hunts; so-called “reports” were biased allegations, either trumped-up or pulled out of thin air. As Smith writes in connection with the case of Rasputin’s friend Yevgenia Terekhova:
  The police called [her] a “courtesan,” yet it stretches credibility to imagine a Petersburg prostitute was also responsible for establishing and then managing her own hospital for wounded soldiers in Moscow. Clearly, the Okhrana agents were too quick to affix labels to the women around Rasputin, although the fault lay less with them and more with their superiors intent on digging up as much dirt on Rasputin as possible, generally with little regard for the truth.
  Smith, on the other hand, settles for nothing short of the truth. His portrait of a spectacularly incompetent royal couple, crippled by the weight of responsibility and the agony of watching their only son succumb to haemophilia, inspires both sympathy and frustration. The explanation he gives for Rasputin’s mysterious power to stop the boy’s bleeding stands to reason: unlike the doctors, who exacerbated Alexei’s condition with their poking and prodding, Rasputin simply left the prince alone, and also “calmed the anxious, fretful mother [who] transferred this confidence to her ailing son, literally willing him back to health.”
  Smith’s portrait of Rasputin himself is even more nuanced. He was a strong-willed, self-taught peasant, endowed with tremendous ambition and susceptible to temptation. A mystic and seeker by nature, he maintained a faith that was as sincere as it was idiosyncratic. He was charismatic and, in general, a good “reader” of those around him. Clearly proud of his (far from infallible) ability to divine people’s thoughts, he used it to gain influence — but also to provide relief. One anecdote crystalizes the blend of faith and ambition, talent and machination that determined his trajectory:
  [W]hile drinking tea with [father superior of the Seven Lakes Monastery outside Kazan] Gavriil and a group of theology students, Rasputin mentioned his intention to travel to St. Petersburg. Gavriil disapproved of the idea, thinking to himself: “You’ll lose your way in Petersburg, the city will ruin you.” All of a sudden, Rasputin leaned in to Gavriil: “And God? What about God?” For Gavriil it was proof Rasputin could read people’s minds.
  If Rasputin was a mind-reader, then Gavriil must have been something of a seer. Surely the most frightening presence in the book is ruinous, corrupt, unstable St. Petersburg itself. A moribund parliament, a politicized security apparatus, a disastrous war, the meddling of foreign agents, intensifying class tensions, scandals, conspiracy theories, misinformation … well, at least it can’t happen here.
  ¤
  Boris Dralyuk is the executive editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

• Seattle Times
  http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/in-rasputin-author-examines-the-truth-behind-the-downfall-of-the-romanovs/
  Word count: 763

  In ‘Rasputin,’ author examines the truth behind the downfall of the Romanovs
  Originally published November 5, 2016 at 6:04 am

  Local historian Douglas Smith looks for truth in the story of the most famous name in Russian history.

  Share story
  By John B. Saul
  Special to The Seattle Times
  ‘Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs’
  by Douglas Smith
  Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 832 pp., $35 (publication date Nov. 22)
  Rasputin may be the most recognized name in Russian history, says author Douglas Smith, but there would be “no Rasputin without the stories about Rasputin.”

  In the 832 pages of “Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs,” Smith meticulously examines those stories for veracity.

  Was Rasputin, a confidante of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, a sex maniac? Smith writes that Rasputin collected a religious following of mostly women, took lovers and, according to police files, frequented prostitutes.

  A lech? Women were “subjected to his creepy petting … Rasputin never learned to keep his hands to himself.”

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  A rapist? Smith cites testimony that casts doubts on that.

  The cause of the downfall of the Romanov family, who had ruled over Russia for 300 years? To a large extent, yes.

  Smith, a Seattle author, historian and translator, worked for the U.S. Department of State in the former Soviet Union and as a Russian affairs analyst for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. He’ll speak about the book (at booksellers Nov. 22) at Town Hall on Nov. 10.

  For “Rasputin,” Smith relied heavily on primary sources: personal letters, government documents and police and press reports. The result is detailed and engaging.

  Rasputin was introduced to Nicholas and Alexandra in 1905. He had been a Siberian peasant until he set off on religious pilgrimages. Then his knowledge of the Scriptures grew, as did his understanding of people — so much so that many believed he had healing powers, used hypnotism and was clairvoyant.

  In St. Petersburg, he found favor with some church leaders and members of the nobility, ultimately resulting in the royal introduction.

  At the start of the 20th century, modernization had society in upheaval, and Russians turned from the old ways to the supernatural and mystical. So did Alexandra, who sought a spiritual adviser to guide her life, including the influence she exerted over the czar and how he ruled.

  It didn’t take long for unsettling questions to surface about Rasputin: an unkempt peasant tucking the royal children in at night? Meeting with the Empress alone? An outlier from the official church offering opinions on who should serve in the church and government?

  Much of what was written about him in the press was damning, much untrue, says Smith. But Rasputin became regarded as the man behind the throne.

  Romanov family members, nobles, government ministers, church and military leaders had tried unsuccessfully for years to persuade the rulers that Rasputin’s presence was harmful. Inevitably, someone decided on murder.

  He was lured to a nobleman’s cellar on Dec. 17, 1916, probably on the promise of meeting that man’s beautiful wife. He may have been poisoned (probably not, says Smith) but he most certainly was shot three times and dumped into a branch of the Neva River.

  His murder did not save the czar, who abdicated on March 2, 1917, victim of the February Revolution, soon followed by the takeover of the Bolsheviks, who murdered the czar and his family on July 17, 1918.

  The right had portrayed Rasputin as a vile figure in hopes the czar would save himself by turning away from him; the left did the same to show the rot in the tsarist system, hoping for its reform or end.

  All united against Rasputin, and in the end, Smith says, against the regime itself.

  John B. Saul, a former Seattle Times editor, recently reviewed “The Romanovs — 1613-1918” by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

• Publishers Weekly
  https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-24084-4
  Word count: 245

  Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs

  Douglas Smith. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $35 (832p) ISBN 978-0-374-24084-4

  In this monumental and soul-shaking biography, historian and translator Smith (Former People) demystifies the figure of Grigory Rasputin a century after his gruesome murder in 1916 at age 47. He portrays the Siberian peasant and Romanov family confidante as earthy, complex, and innocent of the worst claims against him: that he was a German spy, royal seducer, and de facto head of state. Smith relies on diaries, letters, police files, and memoirs to dispel long-held rumors about Rasputin’s relationship with Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra. With a Dostoyevskian flair for noir and obsession, Smith exposes the base motivations behind Rasputin’s enemies—including Duma members, church fathers, noble families, government ministers, and heads of secret police—while being frank about his subject’s love of Madeira and women. Smith expertly handles the intricacies of the salacious scandals that enveloped the empire in anti-Rasputin hysteria and that eerily presaged the fall of the Romanovs in 1917. Displaying commendable detective work and a firm understanding of the Russian silver age and the synod, Smith articulates even the most obscure cultural nuances with fluidity, sometimes slowing the pace but never losing his focus on his worthy and mesmerizing subject. Smith’s depravity-laden history of turn-of-the-20th-century Russia hinges on his insightful readings of myth and motive, and their tragic consequences. (Nov.)

• Shelf Awareness
  http://www.shelf-awareness.com/issue.html?issue=2866#m34313
  Word count: 576

  ook Review

  Review: Rasputin

  Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $35 hardcover, 848p., 9780374240844, November 22, 2016)

  Douglas Smith's Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs may seem like a daunting read. Weighing in at more than 800 pages and featuring a level of detail that brings to mind Robert Caro's accomplished doorstops, Rasputin is not just another in a long line of biographies of the so-called "holy devil." Smith, the author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy, has written the definitive account of Grigory Rasputin's life and times, correcting more than a century's worth of disinformation and propaganda surrounding a humble peasant who became a near-mythic figure.

  Smith questions every element of the mythos, even countering accusations of his criminal background as a horse thief through "a series of documents that have languished unnoticed... until now." That will become something of a refrain throughout the biography, as Smith not only reinterprets the work of his predecessors but also provides a wealth of new information about Rasputin and disproves countless claims made against the starets--a Russian term for a religious elder.

  Rasputin's life is the stuff of biographers' dreams even without the traditional embellishments. Beginning with Rasputin's obscure transition from a Siberian peasant to a pilgrim wandering among Russian Orthodox holy sites, Smith explains how Rasputin developed his religious outlook: "[he] took in all that the Russian religious world had to offer but kept only that which suited him, fashioning in the process his own version of peasant Orthodoxy." And similarly, his famous talent for reading people: "he had seen nearly all there was to behold in the sprawling empire of the tsars and had moved among all manner of people.... His knowledge of the Russian social order was broad and his understanding of human psychology, deep."

  Far from uncovering banal reality behind Rasputin's supposed mystical talents, Smith instead explains how the man's forceful personality came to have such an impact on intelligent, learned people such as the Tsar and Tsarina. He even puts forward a theory for Rasputin's seemingly miraculous ability to heal the young Tsarevich: "At a time when the medical profession had no way to treat hemophilia, and the fussings of the doctors only served to exacerbate Alexei's suffering, Rasputin's instruction to leave him in peace was vital to his recovery, especially when considered together with his words of hope of assurance that all would be well."

  The Rasputin that emerges in Smith's portrait is strikingly different from the one that dominates the popular imagination to this day. In Smith's telling, Rasputin did occasionally fall prey to vice, specifically adultery and drinking to excess, but he was also devoted to his family, a sincere believer and a fervent supporter of the royal family as well as the peasant class he was born into. Rasputin's ascendancy frightened some important Russians who began an enormously influential media campaign against him. That campaign was so successful that Smith's book reads like a revelatory work of revisionist history, unearthing a flesh-and-blood person from a century's worth of lies and exaggerations. --Hank Stephenson, bookseller, Flyleaf Books

  Shelf Talker: Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs is a massive biography of the famous Russian spiritual leader that may prove to be the definitive portrait of his life and times.

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/12/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview10
  Word count: 980

  Russia with love
  Catriona Kelly is touched by the story of a serf who married a nobleman
  Pearl by Douglas Smith
  Buy Pearl at the Guardian bookshop
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  Catriona Kelly
  Friday 11 July 2008 19.06 EDT First published on Friday 11 July 2008 19.06 EDT
  The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia

  by Douglas Smith

  352pp, Yale, £25

  On February 26 1803, a carriage and six draped in black cloth and accompanied by policemen, clergy, choirs and icon-bearers made its slow way from the Fountain Palace in St Petersburg, down Liteiny and Nevsky Prospects to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, the premier burial ground in the city. The funeral was unusual less for its opulence than because it had not been announced, and was attended by almost nobody from the St Petersburg aristocracy. In the coffin lay Praskovia, wife of one of the richest nobles in Russia, Nicholas Sheremetiev. Formerly a serf, for nearly two decades she had been the mistress of the man she had now left a heartbroken widower.

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  It is with this funeral that The Pearl opens - suitably, since Praskovia is throughout the book an elusive absence. There is no doubt that she was exceptionally talented. A brilliant soprano with an impressive musical and dramatic range, she was known as a particularly convincing interpreter of queenly roles. Demanding coloratura scores were specially rewritten to show off her technical resources; appealing rather than classically beautiful, she held audiences with the power of her voice. But Praskovia's roles, like her singing, have a sad ephemerality (suffice it to say that the most famous composer she performed was Salieri). Detailed reconstructions of forgotten operas quickly pall, though Douglas Smith's descriptions of the performers in their jewelled costumes are lush.

  Yet while the emphasis is on the "forbidden love" aspect of Praskovia's life, it is precisely Nicholas and Praskovia's relationship that proves most difficult to reconstruct. Praskovia herself left almost no written documents. Nicholas wrote teasingly about her to his friends, but concealed her from public view. Besotted, yet also deeply conscious of social proprieties, he offered Praskovia marriage very late in their relationship and announced the union only when he had received the tsar's blessing. Nicholas's writings from the period after Praskovia's death depict a woman of unearthly sweetness, ignoring the resilience she must have needed to survive the carping of many in the Sheremetiev household and beyond. Facts that can be unearthed are often puzzling - was the long-delayed arrival of a child to Nicholas and Praskovia the result of traditional abortifacient or contraceptive techniques (as Smith hints it may have been), or psychosomatic, deriving from Praskovia's view that, because unmarried, she had no right to be a mother?

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  Smith has filled the gap by historical reconstruction, drawing on generalised ethnography to retrace the childhood Praskovia probably had, and artfully interweaves the plots of operas and the events of Praskovia's life. On stage, aristocrats dressed as peasants and good-hearted plebeian girls caught the eye of noblemen; performance and reality merged into one. Much has to be extrapolated, but this is not exactly "faction", more an intense examination of the surface of psychologies whose depths are probably beyond reach.

  While entertaining no illusions about the exploitative nature of serfdom, Smith still manages to show how life as a serf actress might have seemed preferable - more security, more intimacy with one's so-called betters, and in some curious way more respect from them, even - than life as a free actress. Praskovia's life dislocated her from her family (her father was kept supplied with vodka, but spent his life in a standard, unimproved village hut). But her extraordinary history also turned her into a symbol of ethereal refinement. A legend invented by Nicholas - that Praskovia was descended from Polish nobility - credited her with an identity often seen as more "western", more cultivated, than the Russian aristocracy itself.

  Despite its unfortunate subtitle, The Pearl is a sophisticated as well as a touching exercise in micro-history, using contemporary documents, memoirs, historical studies and Smith's own observations of the Sheremetiev estates to place Praskovia against the scenery of her times. Smith concludes (from a copy of St Dmitri of Rostov's Prayer of Confession to God, which begins "I the damned, the sea of unsurpassed loathsomeness") that Praskovia, a deeply religious woman, was tormented by a sense of sin. Yet at the same time the two (judging by a request from Nicholas that lodgings in St Petersburg should contain space for "a husband and wife and their two servants") considered themselves married long before the church sealed their union. In the world of cynical social climbing and snobbery that was the beau monde of 18th-century Russia, their lasting union represented an astonishing human achievement.

  No wonder that the fate of "the Pearl" has since been the subject of so much sentimental reflection - from the Sheremetiev family's personal cult of their ancestor to the glorification, during the Soviet period, of Praskovia as a radical figure in the history of cultural egalitarianism. Yet this is not an analysis of myth-making so much as an addition to it. Smith's achievement is to draw a picture that stands between the schematised extremes of cross-class love in the Russian literary classics: Karamzin's Poor Liza, who, deceived and dishonoured by a nobleman, drowns herself, and Dunya, the daughter of Pushkin's stationmaster from Tales of Belkin, who ends up as a nobleman's wife, but without suffering the envy or the self-hatred that seem to have been the lot of the Pearl.

  · Catriona Kelly's Children's World: Growing Up in Russia, 1890-1991 is published by Yale.

• Washington Post
  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/15/AR2008051503992.html
  Word count: 835

  BIOGRAPHY
  Fair Lady

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  Reviewed by Selwa Roosevelt
  Sunday, May 18, 2008
  THE PEARL

  A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia

  By Douglas Smith

  Yale Univ. 328 pp. $35

  If truth is indeed stranger than fiction, then there can be no better example of that maxim than The Pearl. This fascinating, well-researched account by Douglas Smith is more than a love story about the singing serf who became the greatest diva in Russia and married her master -- Russia's wealthiest noble, Count Nicholas Sheremetev. It's also a vivid account of the privileged lives and baroque splendor of the Russian aristocracy in the 18th century -- the golden age of the Russian nobility -- and the complex interaction between the wealthy few and their countless serfs, who were the basis of that wealth.

  Smith's book gives a greater understanding of the origins and traditions of Russian music, ballet and theater, and how the nobles, using their serfs as performing artists and set designers, created the cultural underpinnings of the Russian dramatic arts we know today. To do this, Smith, author of several books about 18th-century Russia, has made extensive use of Russian state resources, as well as of the rich archives of the Sheremetev family, which miraculously survived 70 years of communism and war.

  As to the story: Count Nicholas Sheremetev owned more than 200,000 serfs -- nearly the population of Moscow or St. Petersburg. According to Smith, the Sheremetevs "were among the richest private landowners in the world." Nicholas and his father, Count Peter Sheremetev, both passionate lovers of music, built magnificent theaters on their great estates near Moscow. Serfs who performed there were given special training, clothing allowances and privileges not enjoyed by peasants who tilled the soil or served the household. In general, Russian serfs were considered property to be bought and sold and were rarely given their freedom, but, according to the author, "Serfdom never sank to the brutalizing and utterly dehumanizing level of slavery in the Americas."

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  Smith spent many years researching this heartbreaking story of the beautiful serf child, Praskovia Kovalyova. Taken from her family at the age of 8 to be the maid to a princess in the Sheremetev household, she made her debut as a singer and actress in a leading role by age 12. Count Nicholas was enchanted by her -- and thenceforth she was known by her stage name, "The Pearl."

  Under Count Nicholas's supervision, Praskovia's training included lessons in Italian, French, religion, history and literature as well as in the dress, carriage and mannerisms of the nobility she would portray on stage. Indeed, she was "the Galatea to his Pygmalion." When the two became lovers is not known, and Smith describes his frustration in not being able to find diaries or letters of Praskovia's to shed some light on her feelings for Nicholas.

  Certainly Count Nicholas at any time might have exercised his droit de seigneur, which apparently he did with others on his estates before he fell in love with Praskovia. He was handsome and appealing, and although they were master and mistress for many years, Nicholas treated her with utmost tenderness. He granted her freedom in 1798, but being a very religious woman, she wanted more than anything else to sanctify their relationship with marriage. It was unheard of for a noble to marry a serf, and Nicholas feared the scandal that would ensue. Rich and powerful though he was, he still had to deal with the imperial family -- Catherine the Great, as well as her successor, Czar Paul I, who reigned briefly, followed by his son, Czar Alexander I.

  When Praskovia almost died from a serious illness, Nicholas made up his mind to marry her. By this time Alexander was czar, and Nicholas felt he could expect a more sympathetic ear from the young emperor. After Alexander's coronation, the lovers wed, although their happiness was short-lived. Praskovia became pregnant and gave birth to a healthy son, Dmitry, but she died three weeks later. Nicholas was devastated. The final chapters of the book tell how he spent the rest of his life giving testimony of the purity of his beloved.

  This great romance has become legend today and is known to almost every Russian -- the subject of songs and drama. But most touching to this reviewer was Nicholas's inscription on the monument to Praskovia, which is in the garden of the Fountain House, their palace in St. Petersburg:

  "I believe I see her waiting shadow/Wandering about this place./I approach! But soon this cherished image/Brings me back to my grief/And flees, never to return." ·

  Selwa Roosevelt is a Washington journalist and a member of the White Nights Foundation, which supports the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, Russia.

• Seattle Times
  http://old.seattletimes.com/html/books/2004430370_pearl25.html
  Word count: 788

  Book review
  "The Pearl": a nobleman defies social conventions
  "The Pearl: A True Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia" by Douglas Smith is a love story between the richest nobleman in Imperial Russia and a young serf with a spellbinding operatic voice — the scribbler of a bodice-ripper romance novel could not ask for better stuff.

  By Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett
  Special to The Seattle Times
  Praskovia Kovalyova, who before marrying Count Nicholas Sheremetev was one of his enslaved artists.
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  COURTESY OF KYRA CHEREMETEFF
  Praskovia Kovalyova, who before marrying Count Nicholas Sheremetev was one of his enslaved artists.
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  Douglas Smith

  The author of "The Pearl" will discuss his book at 7 p.m. June 2 at the University Book Store's Seattle location (206-634-3400; www.ubook
  store.com).

  "The Pearl: A True Tale

  of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great's Russia"

  by Douglas Smith

  Yale University Press, 284 pp., $35

  A love story between the richest nobleman in Imperial Russia and a young serf with a spellbinding operatic voice — the scribbler of a bodice-ripper romance novel could not ask for better stuff. Now, imagine the same story undertaken with meticulous historical research of thousands of archival documents, crafted by a scholar who moves with impressive agility between the past and present, among English, Russian and German.

  Author Douglas Smith, a resident scholar at the University of Washington, is one of a small circle of people on the planet who could think up this book — and have the gray matter to do it well. Smith is not a showy writer, but he is anything but distant from his subject. He's caught up in the romance of his story, yet stays tethered to facts and moves us through a complex society with ease.

  Reading about Russians of the 18th and early 19th centuries usually feels like wandering through one of those garden mazes made of high, dense hedges. One has the sense of being somewhere very interesting but in peril of being hopelessly lost every few minutes. "The Pearl's" clear narrative (and the author's blessed decision to keep those endless derivatives of Russian names to a minimum) keeps things humming along.

  The rarity of a marriage like that between Count Nicholas Sheremetev and Praskovia Kovalyova in 1801, three years after he granted her freedom, is hard to overstate. An affair between an aristocrat and his slave — which is precisely what a serf was — wasn't unusual, particularly if she was one of the popular actors and singers who performed in elaborate estate troupes of the day. Yet this couple's long relationship, beginning as mature patron and promising young singer and continuing until her death at 34 shortly after bearing their lawful son, was completely unprecedented.

  Praskovia, a folk heroine in Russian poetry and song, had by all accounts a captivating voice and commanding presence while still a girl. The historical clues to this diva's life are thin, and Smith's detective work is impressive. His ability to convey what he knows versus what he supposes is particularly skilled.

  The Count's lifelong defiant rejection of the rigid class structure of Catherine the Great's era is intriguing, but more so is the picture Smith creates of the serfs' insular world:

  "If the hundreds of house serfs that served in Nicholas's homes saw themselves as a cut above the poor ignorant peasants, then the theater troupe was a rung higher still. They formed a quasi-aristocracy among the hundreds of thousands of Sheremetev serfs."

  Performers in the troupe lived lives considerably more demanding than those who toiled only in the kitchens and fields. Every minute of the performers' days was scheduled and controlled by their master, an exhausting sort of artistic house arrest. Capturing this world plays to Smith's tireless researching abilities and good touch with detail:

  "Each performer's place within the hierarchy of the troupe was immediately and unavoidably evident by what she wore, by where she slept, by the strength of her cup of tea, by the color of her bread."

  "The Pearl," with its come-hither subtitle, will lure many a reader seeking breathless romance. The lovers' story is a remarkable tale to be sure, but what most surprises and lingers is the revelation of this world of enslaved artists who served virtually every need of their country's ruling class, and until now remained largely hidden to most of us.

  Copyright © 2008 The Seattle Times Company

• Kirkus
  https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/douglas-smith/former-people/
  Word count: 354

  FORMER PEOPLE
  The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy
  by Douglas Smith
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  KIRKUS REVIEW
  When the Bolshevik Revolution came in 1917, the new order began transforming aristocrats into paupers, exiles and corpses—a transformation that consumed decades.

  Smith, a former U.S. diplomat and authority on the Soviets and author of several previous works (The Pearl: A Tale of Forbidden Love in Catherine the Great’s Russia, 2008, etc.), takes a different approach to revolutionary history, focusing on the fallen class: Who were they? What had their lives been like? What happened to them? The author follows two aristocratic families (later, they intermarried), the Sheremetevs and the Golitsyns, showing the splendor in which they lived and then the squalor into which they declined. The author is deeply sympathetic to their fates. Although he states that the aristocracy had, of course, flourished on the servitude of others, he tells such wrenching, emotional stories about his characters that it’s easy to forget who once wore the silken slippers. Smith’s research is remarkably thorough in its range and detail, so much so that readers may feel overwhelmed by such powerful surges of suffering. Searches, arrests, firings, confiscations of property, internal exile, imprisonments, tortures, executions, desecration of graves—these and other grim experiences Smith chronicles in his compelling narrative. He mentions significant historical events, but his intent is to show how these events affected his characters. He portrays with brutal clarity the truth of Orwell’s Animal Farm: A new aristocracy—a political one—emerged to enjoy the benefits of living on the labor of others.

  Sobering stories about the politics of power—its loss, its gain—and the deep human suffering that inevitably results.

  Pub Date: Oct. 2nd, 2012
  ISBN: 978-0-374-15761-6
  Page count: 496pp
  Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
  Review Posted Online: July 29th, 2012
  Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15th, 2012

• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/18/former-people-russian-smith-review
  Word count: 737

  Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy by Douglas Smith – review
  It's hard to pity a privileged elite… until you read this fluent account of what befell the Russian aristocracy under the Bolsheviks
  The eagle statue that overlook the southern Russian city of Pyatigorsk
  ‘Swept aside’: The imperial eagle overlooks the Russian city of Pyatigorsk. Photograph: Alamy
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  Rodric Braithwaite
  Saturday 17 November 2012 19.04 EST First published on Saturday 17 November 2012 19.04 EST
  Russian aristocrats were still a stiff-necked and arrogant lot at the beginning of the 20th century. The days when they could buy and sell serfs were long over but most still drew their money from land which they did not manage well. They lived, often beyond their income, in luxurious townhouses and on magnificent country estates. Some worked in the state bureaucracy and the army. Others were mere playboys. Most clustered around the sadly incompetent and obstinate Tsar Nicholas II, and shared his limited views about the destiny of the nation. By any reckoning they were already becoming an anachronism that would be swept aside as their country developed. Unlike the British aristocracy, they never learned that it was better to bend than to break.

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  Behind them a new class was emerging, people they despised, the merchants and the former serfs who were the embryo of a modern entrepreneurial bourgeoisie. If other things had been equal, it would have been these people, not the aristocrats, who would have carried the future of their country.

  But other things were not equal. Revolution and civil war brought the Bolsheviks to power, men who were determined to wipe out anybody who might conceivably oppose them and their Manichaean ideology. Neither the aristocracy nor the new bourgeoisie survived the reign of terror that Lenin unleashed upon them.

  In his well-researched, fluent and substantial account, Douglas Smith describes what happened to the aristocrats, and especially to the numerous Sheremetevs and even more numerous Golitsyns, two of Russia's grandest and oldest families. Through memoirs, diaries, letters, interviews and documents he builds a detailed picture of these people both before and after their lives were changed for ever by revolution and a barbaric civil war.

  In these tumultuous events all sides behaved with equal savagery. But it was the victorious Bolsheviks who institutionalised terror as they tightened their grip on a devastated country. Many aristocrats were killed or driven into exile. Many who stayed behind – the "former people", as the Bolsheviks called them – perished in the purges or survived by concealing their origin. Some saw what was happening as a just retribution for their own sins of commission and omission. Prince Vladimir Golitsyn, who had been a liberal mayor of Moscow, wrote in his memoirs: "We, the people of the present century, are paying for the sins of our forefathers, and particularly for the institution of serfdom, with all its horrors and perversions… Who is to blame that the Russian people, the peasant and the proletarian, proved to be barbarians? Who, if not all of us?"

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  But however blind the aristocracy as a class may have been to the consequences of their selfishness and political ineptitude, the fate they suffered as individuals went beyond all measure. Their fall from privilege to desperate poverty and worse was steep and final. By concentrating on them Smith perhaps gives the unintended impression that the quality of their suffering was unique. It was not, of course. As Lenin was followed by Stalin, millions of their fellow countrymen – the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, the workers and peasants in whose name the new regime had been proclaimed – suffered at least as badly, and in far greater numbers.

  With the decline and fall of the Soviet regime, the survivors began to emerge from hiding, to reassemble their scattered families and to reassert their place in the history of their country. In the new Russia it became respectable, even snobbishly desirable, to be able to call yourself a Russian aristocrat. There was even some passing talk about restoring the monarchy. But the aristocrats, unlike the reconstituted bourgeoisie, never had a hope of resuming a role in the new body politic. It was a poor substitute for a happy ending.

• New York Times
  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/fashion/former-people-the-final-days-of-the-russian-aristocracy-and-the-summer-palaces-of-the-romanovs-treasures-from-tsarskoye-selo.html
  Word count: 949

  FASHION & STYLE | BOOKS OF STYLE

  Among the Ghosts of Imperial Russia
  By LIESL SCHILLINGERNOV. 2, 2012
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  “Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy,” by Douglas Smith. FSG. 496 pp. $30.

  “The Summer Palaces of the Romanovs: Treasures From Tsarskoye Selo,” edited by Emmanuel Ducamp. Photographs by Marc Walter. Thames & Hudson. 360 pp. $100.

  THE age of the czars in Russia is long past ... or is it? Unless you’ve attended one of Manhattan’s anachronistic Russian Nobility balls, given each spring by heirs of Russia’s defunct elite (their gala committees ripple with Romanovs), you may not be aware of the nostalgia for imperial Russia that lingers in some circles in the 21st century, almost 100 years after the Bolshevik Revolution.

  Since 1991, when Yeltsin dissolved the Soviet Union and post-Communist Russia was born, the country’s onion domes have been regilded, luxury dachas have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain, and prosperity (for some Russians, at least) has reached heights not seen since Peter the Great and Catherine the Great built their fairy-tale palaces near the Neva River in the 18th century. These days, 100 Russians pack Forbes.com’s billionaires list; jet-setters can be seen snarfing caviar and buying Gucci, Versace and Cartier trinkets at the world’s choicest playgrounds. Art collectors from Moscow and St. Petersburg snag masterpieces at auction, and Russian cultural ambitions are on the rise.

  Into this aspirational climate, and in a year that swells the hearts of Slavophiles (2012 marks the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, which inspired Tchaikovsky’s “1812 Overture” as well as Tolstoy’s divertissement “War and Peace”), enter two enthralling new books that recall readers to the past glories and tumult of the Russian empire. One is the social history “Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy,” by Douglas Smith, which reminds World War I buffs that England wasn’t the only country that sacrificed the cream of its society to conflict. The other is “The Summer Palaces of the Romanovs: Treasures From Tsarskoye Selo,” a lustrous album of photographs by Marc Walter.

  With wise and rapturous commentary, the “Tsarskoye Selo” book showcases the grounds, palaces, facades and interiors of the country estate Peter the Great bought for his wife in 1710, and which Catherine the Great overhauled a half-century later. The Catherine Palace, a Rococo confection with a facade of Sèvres blue, cream and gold leaf, puts Versailles to shame. Inside, one glistening room is walled entirely in amber; when you enter, your skin shimmers orange-gold, as if you were standing in the center of a candle flame. When she finished with that palace, the empress built another (this one in the neo-Classical style, for a change) for her favorite grandson, who ruled Russia during the Napoleonic wars as Czar Alexander I. A little over a century later, it was the Alexander Palace where Nicholas and Alexandra (and their children) were imprisoned before being taken to Siberia and murdered by Bolsheviks.

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  In the 21st century, many Americans are well-enough versed in Tchaikovsky, Tolstoy and various czars and emperors, but few recall the once-illustrious names of Golitsyn and Sheremetev, whose fortunes guttered along with those of imperial Russia. In Douglas Smith’s engrossing reassessment of this erased segment of that country’s society, he writes: “For nearly a millennium, the nobility, what the Russians called ‘belaya kost,’ literally ‘white bone’ (our ‘blue blood’), had supplied Russia’s political, military, cultural, and artistic leaders.” For the last century, their names were overshadowed by Lenin and Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, Gorbachev, Yeltsin and, finally, Putin. But the name of Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport hints at the endurance of the older line; as does the presence of a young Galitzine (Frenchified Golitsyn) princess on the committee of this year’s Russian Nobility revel at the Pierre.

  “Former People” restores the distinctness of that blurred line with evocative photographs of counts and princesses in fur hats, ornamental swords and masquerade dress, and with richly detailed event and anecdote, bringing its social tableau into renewed clarity. Some of Mr. Smith’s stories have unusually piquant resonance in the present day: the Bright Young Things of Moscow who danced the fox trot in the 19-teens were denounced by the Revolutionary propagandists Maxim Gorky and Anatoly Lunacharsky as “decadent and lacking in class consciousness,” he notes. Back during the topsy-turvy fever of Revolutionary Russia, such trendiness could be a capital offense. Anyone seeing the Benzes and Rolls-Royces of Putin’s Moscow might think such prohibition against decadence was a thing of the past.

  But this summer, on the eve of the Battle of Moscow anniversary, a 21st-century group of Bright Young Things went on trial for the Soviet-style charge of “hooliganism” — singers in the girl band Pussy Riot — and the world saw that czars or no czars, Bolsheviks or no Bolsheviks, a hipster who didn’t toe the line could be fox-trotting toward prison camp. The demise of Russian imperial clout just may have been exaggerated.

  A version of this review appears in print on November 4, 2012, on Page ST9 of the New York edition with the headline: Among the Ghosts Of Imperial Russia. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

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• Independent
  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/paperback-review-former-people-the-last-days-of-the-russian-aristocracy-by-douglas-smith-8612254.html
  Word count: 345

  Paperback review: Former People: The Last Days of the Russian Aristocracy, By Douglas Smith
  Ghostly testimony from a world away

  Lesley McDowell Saturday 11 May 2013 23:01 BST0 comments

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  Smith: A sobering story told with clarity and sympathy Getty Images
  "A new and hostile Russia glared through the large windows of the palace," wrote Tsar Nicholas's brother, the Grand Duke Alexander, after a ball in 1903. It sums up perfectly not just the hostility of the peasantry towards the upper classes before the revolution, but the huge sense of division between the poverty of most of the country and the luxury enjoyed by the very few. This would be the "last ball" of Imperial Russia, Smith notes in his excellent history of the Sheremetev and Golitsyn families, who would be decimated by what was to come.

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  That much is familiar to us, whether from history or novels such as Pasternak's Dr Zhivago, but Smith gives us the families' reactions in their own words, and it's perhaps surprising how many of them were in favour of the revolution in the early stages. Tsar Nicholas was nobody's favourite – Petrograd's February revolution was greeted with joy by Sergei Golitsyn's parents. But families were also split in their feelings – Sergei's grandmother was less convinced. They got used to sleeping with revolvers under their pillows, whilst the theatres continued to sell out.

  Smith shows a class used to sophistication subjected to barbarity as the revolution descended into bloodlust, with both sides committing atrocities. But he also shows a lingering fascination for the aristocracy amongst the new ruling elite, especially in the 1920s, when the Golitsyns were allowed to carry on life almost as they had before, until Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s. It is a sobering tale of the complexities of revolution, told with clarity and sympathy.

• New Republic
  https://newrepublic.com/article/110864/end-russian-aristocracy-nobility-tsar-nicholas-lenin
  Word count: 1461

  The Lost Generation: The End of the Russian Aristocracy
  BY YELENA AKHTIORSKAYA
  December 11, 2012

  THE LAW OF the literature of suffering is fairly basic: the greater the suffering, the better the literature. But equally important is that the suffering be warranted. The Nazis were savaged at Stalingrad, but tell it to the judge. The Russian nobility—or “former people” as they came to be called in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution—falls on ambiguous middle ground. Though the obliteration of an entire social class is shocking, it is hard to shake the feeling that they had it coming. Why should we extend our limited empathy to the small collective of families who owned practically all of Russia’s land, resided in exorbitant luxury, and were serviced round-the-clock by colonies of slaves?

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  Douglas Smith makes it his mission to make us care. For the record, he is not just assuming our general disinterest—the glaring gap in the historical literature bespeaks neglect. It’s not often that such a void is found at the center of the well-trod annals of Red Square, and Smith is well aware of having struck historiographical gold. With urgency and precision, he chronicles the fate of the nobility from the dawn of the revolution.

  Using three generations of the aristocratic Sheremetev family of St. Petersburg and the Golitsyns of Moscow, Smith shows that the nobility in Russia was Russia; its downfall was “the end of a long and deservedly proud tradition that created much of what we still think of today as quintessentially Russian, from the grand palaces of St. Petersburg to the country estates surrounding Moscow, from the poetry of Pushkin to the novels of Tolstoy and the music of Rachmaninov.” Nabokov père strutted in “spats and a derby” to the train that took his family to short-lived safety in Crimea. Lenin’s father was a “Your Excellency” whose financial support allowed young Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to focus on his extracurricular interest in insurgence. The systematic extinction (though what an unsystematic system!) of the Russian elite was saturated in contradiction and irony, and Smith is light on his toes in exposing both. But he is always mindful of the gravity of his subject, and very persuasively makes the point that disinterest toward the destruction of the Russian elite is disinterest toward much of Russia.

  Moreover, the aristocracy pleads its own case convincingly, namely by not pleading it at all: most of them, as Smith chronicles, supported the revolution that would lead to their decline. If Russia shone with the nascent glimmer of a democratic republic between the deposing of the tsar and the Bolshevik coup it was due, largely, to the efforts of the nobility. “The old system was rotten, everyone knew that,” encapsulated Baroness Meiendorff. But hanging red flags out of windows did not exempt the nobility from the terror to come (it would be disingenuous to say they didn’t hope that it might). When they wound up in the camps, their breeding was as much on display as it had been at the balls. Solzhenitsyn found them to be “genuine aristocrats.” “Because of their upbringing, their traditions, they were too proud to show depression or fear, to whine and complain,” he wrote. “It was a sign of good manners to take everything with a smile, even while being marched out to be shot.” Some, like Prince Vladimir Mikhailovich Golitsyn, the governor of Moscow Province from 1887 to 1891 and mayor of Moscow for almost a decade (referred to simply as “the mayor” throughout the book), refused to countenance any nostalgia for the good old days: “In our domestic strife one cannot but see retribution for the evil done to the people, for centuries of repression.” In June 1918, he wrote, “We are all just as guilty, and we all turned out to be blind, unconscious instruments of fate.”

  State policy under Lenin was to “expropriate the expropriators” leading to “a circular system of perpetual robbery,” writes Smith. The lucky ones were driven out of their estates, the unlucky immolated while still residing. Countess Kleinmichel was entertaining when an armed gang broke into her home. She and her guests sought shelter in a house across the street, watching the destruction from afar. When she finally returned to her home, it had been made into a soldier’s hostel: “[t]he grand staircase was turned into a rifle range, large portraits of the Romanovs serving as the targets.”

  Other humiliations varied. The residents of some nice neighborhoods were made to dig graves for victims of typhus, receiving a compensatory cup of tea; the registered nobility cleaned the toilets of public buildings. Food rations depended on social class, and former people got “just enough bread so as not to forget the smell of it.” Ivan Bunin, after undergoing a series of inspections, spoke for their plight: “In ‘free’ Russia only soldiers, peasants, and workers have a voice.” (Soon enough even those voices would be silenced.)

  With each passing year, the predicament became worse, until it became impossible. In 1935, Operation Former People went into effect, finally getting rid of the last of these “human degenerates—the aristocrats of tsarist Russia,” as the Leningrad newspapers put it, who were “age-old exploiters and bloodsuckers” or better yet, simply “vermin.” The Metamorphosis had already been written, but Kafka had nothing on Stalin.

  The many characters of Former People are murdered by mobs, arrested repeatedly, tortured and starved, sent to the gulag, shot and shot and shot (how many times does that word appear in this book?)—unless, that is, they decide to leave Russia, in which case, they settle in coastal France or in Los Angeles, where they go into the movies. Alexander Golitzen, grandson of “the mayor,” became an art director and was nominated for fourteen Oscars. The vast wealth of the aristocracy meant that emigration was always an option. Even if their estates were looted or pillaged, one necklace, stitched into the lining of a child’s teddy bear, could fund life abroad.

  But there were consequences to fleeing—shame not the least of them. “Count Sergei,” writes Smith, “tried to instill in his family the idea that it was ignoble ‘to flee a sinking ship.’” Shortly before he died, he told his son Pavel that he must not sell their belongings to quiet a grumbling stomach; “The Rembrandts, Raphaels, Van Dycks, Kiprenskys, and Greuzes—they must all belong to Russia… a museum must be established before the cold and upheavals destroy everything.” Pavel dedicated himself to this cause, but “by the end of 1929 nothing of the old estate and its collection remained.”

  Early in 1932, “the mayor” died in Dmitrov, having been exiled from Moscow. Among his papers was a text written a month before his death, where he predicted that the collapse of the Soviet Union “will come about as a result of the power of inertia, and not under the blows of some external threat … it will fall all by itself, under its own weight.” Sixty years later, it did. Of course, the USSR’s dissolution did not bring a return to the glory days of Imperial Russia, yet at the end of Smith’s epilogue I could not help but feel a pang of yearning that such a restoration did not take place. Aristocratic rule may not be desirable, but if Nicholas II was a throwaway tsar, Putin threatens to become a dictator-for-life.

  In the process of sifting through the slews of personal letters, documents, and journals amassed by these sprawling interconnected aristocratic families, Smith was clearly won over by them. He is invested in their (former) cause, and narrates the events of their lives with passion. Passion is the key word. The characters of this book believed in Russia—as a motherland, as a concept, as a unique people unified by an inexplicable force that might be called fate—so passionately, so purely, so utterly and often so selflessly, and it is this passion that Smith has translated to the page. Former People is a thorough, extensively sourced history, and also something of a spiritual restitution. Though Smith’s subjects cannot be comforted, his readers might be: It is because of Russia's ineffably strange past that we should continue to believe in her future.

  Yelena Akhtiorskaya is a writer living in Manhattan.

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