DATE: Wednesday, November 19, 1997          TAG: 9711180057

SECTION: DAILY BREAK             PAGE: E5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: BOOK REVIEW 

SOURCE: BY GEORGE HEBERT 

                                            LENGTH:   92 lines

BRITISH AUTHOR PROVIDES DETAILED ACCOUNT OF RUSSIAN ICON

RASPUTIN.

Russia's ``mad monk,'' in the shorthand of popular history.

Pious, advice-giving ``friend'' of the last tsar and his empress.

The ``Dark One'' in reports of the crumbling monarchy's secret police.

Just how evil - or how good - or how powerful was Rasputin?

In ``Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned,'' British author Brian Moynahan delivers what may be as close to a final judgment as we are ever likely to get.

Moynahan, known for his Russian expertise as a correspondent and European editor for the London Sunday Times, packs the volume with layers of detail and drama, drawn from an incredible supply of diaries and other documentary sources. The whole era of World War I and the onset of Bolshevik communism is evoked in all its chaos and pain.

As for Grigory Efimovich Rasputin himself, the author tells us everything we ever wanted to know - plus some things beyond ordinary curiosity.

First, to clear away a couple of fictions, Moynahan makes it plain that the ``peasant-colossus,'' who for so long had the ears of Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, was neither mad nor a monk.

The cadaverous, bearded, hard-drinking Rasputin was more crafty than crazy. When he arrived in the imperialist capital a few years after the turn of the century, with grime under his fingernails, society folk found his peasant origins appealing. Hence his eccentric refusal to discard his dirt-farmer style of dress.

To some, Rasputin's disjointed speech and mystical airs, his fierce way of looking at people and incidents of pious hysteria in his younger years suggested derangement.

Insofar as his church standing was concerned, he belonged to no monkish order, but instead was a traveling ``starets'' or holy man - and self-anointed at that. He began playing this role after a mere three-month visit to a monastery and a claim to a vision of the Virgin.

When it comes to evil, to the ways that Rasputin ``sinned,'' his hungry womanizing is thickly documented. But even worse than the lechery was his use of his religious mantle to keep himself supplied with female companions: He urged them to yield to fleshly pleasures to purify themselves; there could be no heavenly forgiveness without sin.

But contrary to suspicions of the times and since, Moynahan finds no solid evidence that Alexandra herself was among the sexual partners.

As to the good in Rasputin, the author discerns quite a bit.

Although plenty of bribe money passed through his hands, he was generous with the rubles.

The healing powers he professed to have were part of some very real compassion. His presence and assurances may indeed have been helpful, in a psychological way, in some of the best-known medical recoveries. Especially those of the Romanov heir, young Alexis, who nearly bled to death several times as the result of his inherited hemophilia. The tsarevich's survival was one, though not the chief, reason for Alexandra's rock-like belief that Rasputin was the monarchy's personal emissary from God. Till the day of her death she would brook no resistance by her husband to the holy commands that she passed along either from Rasputin in person or from his ghost.

Also on the good side, Moynahan cites evidence of a strong humanitarian streak in the royal confidant, including a deep sympathy for minorities such as the pogrom-plagued Jews.

Further, and oddly enough for a man prone to drunken, sexual orgies, Rasputin was a supportive family man, always maintaining a close connection with his wife, Praskovya, and their children back in the Siberian village where he was born in 1869.

As to Rasputin's power, he failed to dissuade the tsar from fighting Germany in the first World War, but in almost every other important respect, his views ruled. The holy confidant's words were a deciding factor in high appointments from the early-1900s up to Rasputin's murder by high-placed conspirators in 1916. Afterward, momentum kept tsarist policies on their disastrous course, leading to the abdication, the coup by the Bolsheviks, and the Communist execution in 1918 of the royal family.

The total impact of Rasputin, however, is not to indict Rasputin himself, but the religious fanaticism, commitment to autocracy and the iron will of the Empress Alexandra. In her unreasoning reliance on her saint-at-court and her ability to control her husband totally, she was the one who actually did the damage.

Without her, Rasputin would not have made it into the history books to be judged one way or another. MEMO: George Hebert is a former editor of The Ledger-Star. He lives in

Norfolk. ILLUSTRATION: Rasputin was a ``beloved friend'' to the last tsar of

Russia, Nicholas II, and his wife, Empress Alexandra.

BOOK REVIEW

``Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned''

Author: Brian Moynahan

Publisher: Random House. 400 pp.

Price: $30

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