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The Rise of Rasputin: The Mad Monk Who Ran Russia

Khalid Elhassan March 3, 2025 18 min

17. “Driving Out Sin With Sin“

Khlysty sect ecstatic prayer ritual. Wikimedia

Rasputin perverted the Khlystys’ beliefs that nearness to God is best achieved by a state described as “holy passionlessness”. Khlysts usually reached holy passionless via exhaustion, through rituals that combined fervent prayer with even more fervent dancing and spinning, until the congregation was worn out. Rasputin ramped things up by inventing a religious doctrine he described as “driving out sin with sin“. He reasoned that the exhaustion to attain a state of holy passionlessness should be total – not just physical, but carnal as well. So Rasputin made his followers reach carnal exhaustion via o-r-g-i-e-s – prolonged bouts of debauchery by the entire congregation in order to get all the base passions out of their systems. That way, they could get nearer to and focus on God without distractions of the flesh.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.