Rasputin

Grigori Rasputin was born in 1869 in Pokrovskoye, a small farming village in Siberia, on the cold eastern edge of the Russian Empire. He grew up a peasant, poor and barely educated, and for much of his early life there was nothing remarkable about him at all. Then, in his late twenties, he made a pilgrimage to a monastery and came back a changed man. He began to wander from village to village as a kind of holy man — praying, preaching and, people said, healing the sick with his hands and his prayers.

Word of this strange, magnetic wanderer travelled ahead of him, and in 1903 it carried him all the way to the capital, Saint Petersburg. There his intense eyes and rough peasant manner made him a curiosity in the drawing rooms of the rich, who were fascinated by mystics and faith healers. In November 1905 he was finally introduced to the two most powerful people in the empire: Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Tsarina Alexandra. It was a meeting that would change all their lives.

The royal couple were carrying a terrible secret. Their only son, the young Tsarevich Alexei — the boy who would one day inherit the throne — suffered from haemophilia, a disease that stops the blood from clotting. The smallest cut or bruise could start bleeding that no doctor could stop, and any episode might kill him. The Tsarina lived in constant fear for her son, and the doctors of the court could do nothing for him.

In late 1906 Rasputin was brought to the bedside of the sick boy, and what happened next made his name. Again and again, when Alexei was bleeding and in agony, Rasputin would arrive, pray over him, speak to him gently — and the bleeding would seem to ease. He did appear to calm the child and stop the attacks when the trained doctors had failed. Historians still argue over how: perhaps his calm steadied the frightened boy, perhaps he told the doctors to stop their useless treatments, perhaps it was simply chance and timing. But to Alexandra there was no mystery at all. She was certain that God had sent this holy man to save her son.

From that moment, Rasputin held such power over the Tsarina that she would hear no word against him. He had no title and no office, yet his influence reached into the running of the whole empire. He whispered advice about ministers and policy; he was too useful to the family to cast aside, and Alexandra protected him fiercely. Meanwhile, rumours about his private life spread through the city — wild drinking, women, and behaviour no holy man should allow himself. The nobles and the public were scandalised. How could a drunken peasant have the ear of the Tsar?

The timing could not have been worse. When the First World War broke out in 1914, it went badly for Russia, and in 1915 Nicholas left to command the army at the front. That left Alexandra — and, behind her, Rasputin — effectively running the government in the capital. To a country sliding into hunger, defeat and chaos, it looked as though a mad peasant was steering the empire onto the rocks. The aristocracy decided that Rasputin had to go.

In December 1916 a group of conservatives decided to kill him to save the throne. They were led by Prince Felix Yusupov, one of the richest aristocrats in Russia, together with a grand duke of the royal family, Dmitri Pavlovich, and a politician, Vladimir Purishkevich. On the night of 30 December 1916, Yusupov lured Rasputin to his palace in Saint Petersburg with the promise of meeting his beautiful wife.

What happened next became one of history's most famous — and most exaggerated — death scenes. According to Yusupov's later account, the plotters fed Rasputin cakes and wine laced with poison, yet he ate and drank and seemed entirely unharmed. In a panic, Yusupov shot him; Rasputin fell, then suddenly rose and attacked him. They shot him again, beat him, and finally wrapped his body and pushed it under the ice of the freezing Neva river. Yusupov claimed the "mad monk" was so hard to kill that only the river finished him — and the legend of the man who would not die was born.

The truth, the autopsy suggests, was simpler and grimmer. The doctors found no clear sign of poison and no water in his lungs, which means he did not drown. He died of gunshot wounds — most likely a final, close-range shot to the forehead. Yusupov, who lost his fortune in the revolution, retold the story for the rest of his life, growing it with each version. Rasputin's murder did nothing to save the monarchy. Within weeks the country fell into a frenzy of strikes and protest; within three months Nicholas had given up the throne, and the three-hundred-year Romanov dynasty was finished. Rasputin himself had reportedly warned that if he died, the royal family would not long survive him — and, whatever the truth of that, they did not.