Why Rasputin remains one of Russia’s most divisive figures 100 years since his legendary murder
The Siberian monk survived cyanide-laced cakes, three bullet wounds and a savage beating before succumbing to an icy river
ONE hundred years ago the body of a Russian monk was pulled from the icy floes of a St Petersburg river.
The bearded figure had been poisoned with cyanide, shot three times and badly beaten before eventually succumbing to the freezing temperatures of the water.
Today, he remains one of the most divisive figures in Russian history – Grigori Rasputin.
The drama of Rasputin’s death, 100 years ago yesterday, proved a fitting finale to a life so bizarre many assigned him mystical powers.
Such was the allure of the shabby monk from Siberia’s icy wastes that he was able to infiltrate the very heart of the Russian imperial family in its final years.
Just two months after the Mad Monk’s assassination the Russian Romanov dynasty would come tumbling down as the Russian Revolution began a process that would see the creation of the Soviet Union.
Suspicions about Rasputin’s influence on Tsar Nicholas II and particularly his wife Alexandra played no small part in ensuring its downfall.
Talk of the monk’s miraculous healing powers had reached the Tsar’s court by 1906.
A worry-stricken Alexandra had long-sought a healer to help cure her son, and heir to the Russian throne, Alexei, of his haemophilia.
Small bruises and cuts proved life-threatening events for the young prince, his blood unable to clot and repair damage.
Yet in Rasputin the Tsarist family found a healer who could control Alexei’s condition.
The royal court became ever-more dependent on Rasputin’s healing powers.
The churchman would be summoned to the Winter Palace whenever fears grew for Alexei’s wellbeing.
Rasputin would talk to him, calming the prince and helping to prevent a potentially lethal bleed.
To this day, experts are unable to say with certainty how he cured the boy prince.
Yet the Tsarist family’s dependence – and particularly that of frantic mother Alexandra – saw whispers reverberate around St Petersburg’s high society.
A notorious womaniser, father-of-seven Rasputin surrounded himself with the ladies of the Russian court.
When war broke out with Germany in 1914, a magnifying glass turned on his relationship with Alexandra – a German herself.
Cruel whispers around the city suggested a sexual relationship had developed between the pair while Nicholas directed Russia’s troops on the front line.
No evidence was ever discovered to suggest any truth in the rumours.
Though letters between the pair hint at a close relationship.
One from Alexandra to Rasputin read: “Only then is my soul at rest when you, my teacher, is sitting beside me and I am kissing your hands and leaning on your savory shoulders.”
But by 1916 with Russia losing the war and food shortages crippling ordinary Russians, patience ran out with the Mad Monk.
Rumours abounded that he was secretly dictating Russia’s faltering war effort by passing on tactical advice to Nicholas II through his wife.
Lured to a party by aristocrat Prince Felix Yusopov, he was plied with cyanide-laced cakes.
Wolfing down the food, his would-be assassin watched on in horror as they had no effect on Rasputin.
An impatient Yusupov reached for his pistol firing into his target’s abdomen, leaving him to die in a pool of his own blood.
But miraculously Rasputin sprang to his feet and attempted to flee his captor’s lair.
Yuspov fired two more shots into Rasputin before beating him, wrapping him in a cloth and throwing him through a hole in the ice of the Malaya Nevka River.
A later autopsy found the 47-year-old survived the cyanide and bullet wounds and had instead died of drowning or hypothermia in the murky depths of the water.
Rasputin’s apparent supernatural ability to dodge death added to rumours of his mystical powers in the years following his demise.
Within a year of his death the October Russian Revolution had seen Lenin introduce communism to the newly-formed Soviet Union.
By July 1918, the Tsar and his family were dead – butchered by communist thugs in the cellar of a remote Russian house.
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