Free The Rasputin File by Edvard Radzinsky

tsar. And ruled until he was exposed and killed by the boyars. But as a result, instead of one impostor, there appeared a multitude of them. The people readily joined the forces of those ‘tsars’, and Russia was for many years embroiled in the great bloody insurrections of the Time of Troubles. More than a hundred such pretenders, each proclaiming himself to be the ‘true tsar’, were active in Russia during those two centuries. One such, the illiterate peasant Emelyan Pugachyov, assembled an army of several thousand peasants and Cossacks and very nearly put an end to Empress Catherine the Great herself.
    Simultaneously active with the earthly tsar-pretenders over the full three-hundred-year reign of the Romanov dynasty were pretenders of the heavenly sort — the ‘Christs’.
    The Khlysty And Sexual Frenzy
    The Khlysty also appeared in Russia in the seventeenth century during the reigns of the first Romanovs. And became powerful. Their history begins simply enough. The sect’s founder was a certain Daniil Filippovich, who proclaimed himself the ‘Lord of hosts’. As Khlyst tradition describes him, ‘This Daniil Filippovich descended from heaven in great glory in a chariot of fire’ and remained on earth in the form of man. According to the same legend, ‘fifteen years before the advent of the “Lord of hosts” Daniil Filippovich, “God’s son” Ivan Suslov was born to a one-hundred-year-old Mother of God.’ At the age of thirty, Suslov was summoned by the ‘Lord of hosts’ Daniil Filippovich, who made him a ‘living god’. Thus, both the ‘Lord of hosts’ and ‘his son Christ’ had appeared in sinful Rus. Along with a ‘Mother of God’, who had given birth to the ‘Christ’. They had come to defend an aggrieved and impoverished people.
    According to Khlyst tradition, the first ‘Christ’ Ivan Suslov was seized by the boyars, taken to Moscow, and crucified at the Kremlin’s Spassky Gate. But he rose from the dead. And they crucified him again, and again he rose. Afterwards, both Daniil Filippovich and Ivan Suslov died, or, more accurately, they returned to heaven, and others became new ‘Lords of hosts’, ‘Christs’, and ‘Mothers of God’.
    The susceptibility of the Khlyst ‘living Gods’ to decay did not trouble their benighted followers in the least. For according to Khlyst belief, with the departure from earthly life (or, more properly, the ascent to heaven) of the latest ‘Christ’, the Holy Spirit was installed in another body. So that during that time many ‘Messiahs’ lived in the bitter Russian land.
    This particular childish mixture of paganism and Orthodoxy was bound to make its appearance in ignorant, ruthlessly oppressed, servile Russia. The Khlyst doctrine opened a world of boundless possibilities to the downtrodden peasant. For it taught that every man may become Christ Himself, and every woman the Mother of God. One had only to rid oneself of the sin of the flesh (the Old Testament Adam) and by a life of righteousness and prayer ready one’s soul for the descent into it of the Holy Spirit — that is, to nurture Christ in oneself. And become Him. It was the mysticism of an ignorant people in which the Holy Spirit was materially lodged in people’s souls. To illiterate peasants, that literalism was joyously clear.
    Now every Khlyst community (or ‘ark’, in their terminology) had its own ‘Christ’ and ‘Mother of God’. At first, the people called the sectarians ‘Christs’. But the rite of self-scourging, of flagellation, once more deriving from pagan times and outlandishly combined with notions about Christ’s flogging, gave the sect the new name of Khlysty (meaning ‘whips’). Their own name for themselves was ‘God’s people’ and, later on, ‘Christ-believers’.
    In preparing their souls for the descent of the Holy Spirit, they naturally preached extreme asceticism. But once again in a quite unexpected Russian form: the suppression of lust