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ranging from the Finnish band Turisas as a folk metal song to Boiled in Lead as a folk punk song. A Washington DC band, Ra Ra Rasputin, even takes its name from the song.

      There lived a certain man in Russia long ago.

      He was big and strong, in his eyes a flaming glow.

      The song goes on:

      Ra ra Rasputin

      Lover of the Russian queen

      There was a cat that really was gone

      Ra ra Rasputin

      Russia’s greatest love machine.

      Given all this, how could I even begin to find a new angle? But as it turns out, Rasputin’s daughter Maria was no less fascinating. The only member of the family to escape Russia after the revolution, she became a cabaret dancer, a lion tamer in the Ringling Brothers’ circus, an American citizen, a Rosie-the-riveter in the American war effort during the Second World War. She also wrote several memoirs.

      Half the poems in Catastroika, which covers more than a century, are in Maria’s voice, and of course her father is among the many issues she addresses. The other half are in the voice of Sasha Federmesser, a fictional Russian Jew who likewise escapes Russia during the turmoil of the early twentieth century, making his way to Baltimore. Russian anti-Semitism is another literary and historical theme.

      With the United States’ complicated relationship with Russia back in the news, I hope that the historical sketch of the Russian empire portrayed in Catastroika sheds some light on a fascinating, often troubled culture.

      —Charles Rammelkamp

      December, 2019

      Prologue: Sightseeing in St. Petersburg

      The Hermitage? Are you kidding?

      The Winter Palace was overwhelming,

      but the modest MusEros on Ligovskiy Av.

      was the high point.

      Sure, we saw the Kolyvan Vase

      in the west wing of the Old Hermitage,

      largest vase in the world,

      like a birdbath for pterodactyls,

      after we’d already passed through

      the Hall of Twenty Columns,

      its amazing mosaic floor,

      hundreds of thousands of cubed-tile tesserae;

      over three million pieces of art altogether,

      largest collection of paintings in the world,

      founded by Catherine the Great in 1764, yes,

      but the MusEros has Rasputin’s footlong dong

      preserved in a glass jar,

      severed from the mystic when he was murdered

      a hundred years ago, in 1916.

      They say just seeing it

      can cure a man of impotence.

      Did it work?

      Maybe it was the exotic unfamiliar surroundings,

      St. Petersburg so different from Davenport,

      or maybe the aphrodisiac qualities of the vodka,

      but when we got back to our room at the Pushka Inn,

      I hadn’t felt such ardor for Alexandra

      since the steamy backseat of my parents’ car

      after football games on crisp Iowa evenings –

      my wife’s name the same as the Romanov tsarina

      rumored to be Rasputin’s lover.

      SASHA

      Call Me Sasha

      After the “People’s Will,” a revolutionary band,

      assassinated Alexander II in 1881 –

      a bomb tossed in Saint Petersburg –

      Jews lost most of the privileges

      we’d been granted in Russia.

      Alexander, the “tsar liberator,” had freed the serfs

      twenty years earlier, and we’d benefited as well.

      Rasputin originally praised the Black Hundreds,

      the nationalist group that promoted Sergei Nilus,

      the mystic who later published

      The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

      as a part of his work on the Antichrist.

      But by 1912 he’d mellowed,

      defending Jews from our detractors,

      calling us “equal before God,”

      which made the Black Hundreds turn on him,

      mocking him for destroying Orthodox Russia

      “for the Yids.”

      But still, I knew better

      than to pursue a friendship

      with his daughter Maria,

      a lovely fifteen-year-old when I first met her,

      fresh to the big city from “The Sleeping Land” –

      what “Siberia” means in Tatar, after all;

      “The Edge” or “The End” in Ostyak.

      “Alexander Federmesser,” I introduced myself,

      noting my parents had named me for the tsar,

      “but you can call me Sasha.”

      Jewels

      Papa knew Rasputin’s secretary,

      Aaron Simanovich, in Kiev,

      where he ran a small jewelry shop –

      all Jews knew every other Jew –

      but I only became aware of him

      when I lived in Saint Petersburg.

      Simanovich had brought his son to Rasputin,

      suffering from Saint Vitus’s Dance,

      Ioann, a teenager when the spasms began,

      jerking like a puppet,

      Pinocchio pulled by strings.

      The Petersburg doctors were helpless,

      so Simanovich, desperate,

      brought Ioann to Rasputin,

      who cured him in ten minutes,

      laying his healing hands on Ioann’s head;

      he never suffered from St. Vitus’ Dance again.

      Simanovich had made a fortune

      selling diamonds to the Tsarina’s friends,

      became Rasputin’s secretary, replacing

      Ivan Dobrovolsky, who, with his wife,

      had been embezzling money

      the petitioners brought to Rasputin.

      Maria called him by her pet name,

      Simochka, fond of the Jew

      who’d saved her father when Khvostov,

      the Interior Minister, tried to assassinate him.

      Later, after the Revolution,

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