The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River

Sun, 28 Jan 2024 11:00:00 +0000

On the freezing night of 16 December 1916 — 29 December by the Western calendar — Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was lured to the Moika Palace in Petrograd, the home of Prince Felix Yusupov, the richest young man in Russia. Within a few hours he was dead, and his body was pushed through a hole in the ice of the Malaya Nevka river. The peasant mystic who had held extraordinary sway over the Empress Alexandra, whose apparent power to calm the haemophilia of the heir to the throne had made him indispensable and detested in equal measure, was gone. But the manner of his going, as it came down to us, reads less like a murder than like the killing of a monster in a folk tale. He was poisoned and would not die. He was shot and would not die. He was shot again, beaten, bound, and drowned — and even then, the story goes, the water finished what the poison and the bullets could not. The near-immortality of Rasputin is one of the twentieth century’s most vivid legends. It is also, in most of its particulars, a fiction — and we can name the man who wrote it.

Rasputin on vo.rs

The Death of Rasputin: Poison, Pistols, and the River