I have always found Rasputin fascinating. Partly because I can hardly believe he’s real. He seems so fantastic. It really shows how backward the Russian monarchs were. Rasputin was never ordained as a monk or any kind of church official. He was known as a staretz (sp?) which was basically a traveling man made semi-holy because of his self-sacrifice and knowledge of the human heart. In actual fact, it took until a man was in his 50s or 60s to be known as one of these. Rasputin gained this reputation in his 30s when he came to Petersburg. He weaseled his way into Royal society and eventually into the heart of the Romanov family.

The amount of screwing he did was amazing. The description of him physically is repulsive so I’m not sure why these women would do it, but do it they did. Sometimes to get a favor for their husbands and sometimes just because Rasputin wanted them. Rasputin had most of the power when it came to ministerial appointments and I believe because of the turnover in the various ministries, the government was weak and disorganized. Because the government was weak and disorganized, people both royalists and parlamentarists, began to doubt the power Tsar Nicolas had.

If Nicolas and Alexandra had been reasonable people, things might have been different for them. Alexandra was just as bad as Marie Antionette in her views of monarchy. The people counted for nothing. Autocracy was everything and she had a divine right to rule over them. She absolutely would not hear of a constitution being drawn up and drafted into law and wouldn’t let Nicolas think of it either. He was completely ruled by her. She encouraged him in everything, even those things to which he was clearly not suited. For example, he decided to become military chief in the time of the First World War. He did not graduate from any military academy, had never fought in any wars or studied any military tactics or strategy but yet he displaced all his war ministers and generals with people he could control. If they had not been losing already at that point, they would have been doomed at that point.

What it took to kill Rasputin is amazing. There was supposed to have been poison (arsenic) in his madiera but he didn’t die of it and it didn’t show up in the autopsy. Prince Felix then had to resort to shooting him. Apparently two or three shots weren’t enough for him so he emptied the gun into Rasputin and dumped his body into a river. It was later retrieved and given a state burial. When the Bolsheviks dug it up and burned it after the coup de etat, pictures of all the Grand Duchesses (Alexandra & Nicolas’ children) were found on his body. When the Royal Family themselves were killed, they all had pictures of Rasputin.

Alexi did appear to get better after a ‘healing’ from Rasputin and it will never be known if his episodes would have subsided on their own or not because each time he had one, Rasputin was called.

In the end it had to happen. Madness and illiteracy can’t run a country forever. When the Communist Regime also fell, it proved it yet again.

One of the better biographies of Rasputin available. Moynahan gives you the spirit of the times and tells an amazing story backed up by new information. ( )