Rasputin

World news continues disastrous and depressing so why not escape with me for a few minutes by reading #EuropeanBios #79, Grigori Rasputin? Born 1869, he was a weird and deeply creepy man about whom I bet you don't know a single true fact; his life was swallowed by his legend.

(#EuropeanBios is a series of Twitter threads about famous European historical figures, from 500 BCE to 1963 CE. I mine for fun facts and comedy, people whose reputations don't match their lives, and queer people. The full list of threads and bios is at TKTKTK)

We will be comparing the facts to the best known source of historical biographical information about him, by which of course I mean the song "Ra Ra Rasputin" by Boney M, because you're all very funny and would definitely have asked me to do that anyway. TKTKTK

So far, so good. His full name was Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, and in the historical record you can usually tell who's on his side because his enemies call him Rasputin, which literally translates as "debauched one" in Russian, and his friends who called him Grigori.

"Rasputin" was actually a really common surname in the village where he was born, Pokrovskoye, in Siberia, although why is unclear given that it's kind of insulting; it may have been a joke. Even today Pokrovskoye is the ass-end of nowhere and at the time it was even more so.

We go off the rails in the very first line of the song because by far the most surprising thing about Rasputin is how recently he lived. You hear stories about the "mad monk", a magician who had a mystical hold over the king and queen of Russia, you think: long ago, right?

But in fact Rasputin is a contemporary, modern figure. He died after World War 1. There are numerous photographs of him. He drove in cars everywhere. Rasputin, who people claimed hypnotized people are read the minds of royalty, had a telephone number: 64646 (really!).

Everything about his life is jarringly modern. People wrote about him in modern tabloids. His enemies tried to make money by selling combined book and movie rights to their sides of the story. Rasputin gossip was its own mini industry; he was like a bearded Kardashian.

Line 2 is slightly better. He was certainly tall (6'4") but kind of gangly and not notably strong. His eyes didn't literally glow but absolutely everyone mentions them: they were piercing, mesmerizing, intense, and this is backed up by every photograph of him that exists.

Again, mixed truth at best. He was certainly deeply unpopular, but few people feared him. The most widespread feeling for him was disgust and hatred, except for his acolytes, including Emperor Nicholas and his wife Alexandra, who absolutely loved him.

Nicholas 2, by the way, was son of Alexander 3, son of Alexander 2, son of Nicholas 1, son of Paul 1, who was the son of our previous subject Catherine the Great. She did pretty well at establishing a dynasty, but Nicholas was about to fuck that all up.

Nicholas was by most accounts pretty dim and inept at being Tsar, and was believed to rely on Alexandra for advice. This is highly relevant because the story of Rasputin is not really about him, it's about the Russian nation finding a scapegoat to blame for Nicholas' mistakes.

The Russian people were fond of the idea of kings *in general*, you see, but not Nicholas specifically and even less so Alexandra, who was born in Germany and thus suspect during World War 1 (of course, Catherine had also been German, but everyone preferred to ignore that).

The story of Rasputin is lots of people willfully building him up as an evil, cunning man responsible for everything wrong in Russia. Everything *was* clearly going to shit but they didn't want to blame Nicholas directly, so instead they claimed it was Rasputin's influence.

There was also a great deal of snobbery involved. Rasputin was a peasant from Siberia with poor table manners, who paid no attention to class distinctions and was chummy with the king and queen. This greatly upset the snooty Russian aristocracy, who couldn't stand him.

So a combination of the king's political enemies using Rasputin as a proxy, snooty nobles who didn't like him personally, and tabloids who didn't care as long as they sold papers created the legend of Rasputin and got the whole country to hate him. But fear him? Not so much.

We're only at line 4, by the way, and still not on solid ground factually. First off: he didn't live in Moscow, he lived in Pokrovskoye most of the time. He certainly spent lots of time in Moscow but not nearly as much as has been claimed, he had a wife and kids at home.

As to whether the chicks thought he was lovely: extremely mixed reports. He certainly had a number of intensely devoted female followers in addition to his devoted wife, but the overwhelming majority of chicks in Moscow and elsewhere thought him weird and uncouth.

Again, we are only skirting the truth. He was a peasant, poorly educated and not terribly literate -- he was not a good reader and could barely write at all. He certainly quoted the Bible a lot but not very accurately, and leaned hard into just saying vaguely spiritual stuff.

The core of Rasputin's preaching, such as it was, was love. He wanted people to love each other: love the poor, love your enemies, love yourself, and most especially, love him, Grigori Rasputin. If your love could come in carnal form that was great, but money was fine too.

Still no. He had a small group of fanatical female followers who treated him first like a preacher, then a father, then a living saint and then a literal god, but they were a very small group, not so much a cult as a sort of harem; they lived with him in Pokrovskoye.

He was however extremely handsy, constantly noted for invading personal space, especially women, with caresses and kisses. He would cross boundaries over and over again, and as is the way with serial sexual harassers it resulted in consent that was arguable at best.

Rasputin has been credibly accused of sexual assault by a great number of women. Despite exaggerated claims of both his wealth and his power he was still a rich and powerful man, and he willfully abused his power to get his way sexually. But he was not widely desired.

Absolutely not. Alexandra was a huge fan of Rasputin preaching, she thought him wise, and she believed he had mystical powers that could cure her son (of which more later). But the idea that they were having sex is just fiction made up by enemies of them both. It never happened.

Lots of Rasputin's legend centers around his famed sexual prowess and enormous penis but -- we have the autopsy records -- it was entirely normal sized. He and his followers certainly did have a fair amount of sex, though, and he regularly hired prostitutes.

It all makes more sense if you think of it through the lens of Russian history: Alexandra was, as an empress, respected and loved, but as a person unpopular. So to bring her down she had to be sleeping with Rasputin, but to make that acceptable it had to be *not her fault*.

So Rasputin's legend as a sexual powerhouse was almost certainly lies from his enemies. He certainly wasn't averse to sleeping with anyone who'd let him, but there are no credible accounts of any particular prowess in this regard. He was just a horny guy from Siberia.

Which brings us to the other major part of his legend, which is that he was the power behind the throne. And again, this is just made up. He certainly gave Nicholas advice, but Nicholas ignored him most of the time. But nobody wanted to say openly "Nicholas sucks at this".

So rather than blame the Tsar for being bad at ruling they blamed Rasputin for corrupting him and leading him astray, on the basis of absolutely nothing at all. Rasputin's advice was usually in line with what the public wanted anyway, but Nicholas was not listening.

Finally, an indisputable historical fact: he did like dancing and was pretty good at it. There are stories of him getting extremely drunk and dancing up a storm and these are, again, mostly made up, but he is documented as a wild and enthusiastic dancer at times.

We're back to making things up. He had a certain amount of political influence and was able to get various allies important jobs, but no more so than any of the nobles at court. The difference was he was a peasant, so they were mad at him for doing what they did all the time.

Another fact! Nicholas and Alexandra were very superstitious people, and before Rasputin they had run through a roster of various quacks and charlatans offering magnets, hypnosis, seances and other mumbo jumbo fashionable around the turn of the 20th century.

Their son, Alexei, had haemophilia, a result of too many cousins getting married in European royalty, and Nicholas and Alexandra did indeed believe that Rasputin had the mystical ability to heal him, and in fact there's some evidence that he really did the child some good.

Medicine at the time did not know what to do about haemophilia and there were no effective treatments other than "leave them alone and let them heal, slowly". Doctors however do not like to be seen doing nothing, so they would mess with Alexei, invariably making things worse.

Rasputin's interventions usually took the form of showing up, calming the child down (Alexei was fond of him as a sort of uncle), and saying "everything will be fine". By virtue of getting the doctors to stop and the child to rest, this did actually work, if only accidentally.

Sort of true. His drinking and lusting were real, if wildly exaggerated, and he had no particular hunger for power, though he enjoyed what he got. But the demands to get rid of him did get louder and louder, because the public was getting steadily more pissed off with Nicholas.

The result was that three different sets of secret police were simultaneously set by different factions in power to keep an eye on Rasputin. They also didn't trust each other, so they reported on his movements and each other's movements in enormous detail in tons of secret files.

There was also an unsuccessful assassination attempt in 1914 by a mentally unwell woman, Chionya Guseva. A follower of one of Rasputin's rival preachers known as Iliodor, she stabbed him outside his home in Pokrovskoye. Iliodor fled the country to escape questioning on his role.

Russia was, meanwhile, going completely to shit. They were at war with Europe, an expensive and logistically draining effort that was leading to food shortages which were in turn feeding unrest in the countryside. Riots were breaking out, law and order was breaking down.

Eventually three nobles decided that the unreset was out of control and they had to break "Rasputin's hold on the queen" by killing him. The idea was that with Rasputin gone Alexandra would stop advising Nicholas and then he would start making good decisions again.

This is of course nonsense. Rasputin wasn't advising Alexandra, and Alexandra wasn't advising Nicholas, except in passing. Nicholas was making a lot of really bad decisions all by himself, but the hysteria had reached such a fever pitch the nobles began to believe their own lies.

They did in fact invite him to come and visit them, and Rasputin came to one of their houses for a meal. Thus began a brutal, messy, wholly inept assassination.

They did in fact try to feed him poison wine and cakes and he did eat them all and feel fine, but this is not because of any mystical power on Rasputin's part so much that they had been sold fake poison by an accomplice who'd had a last-minute change of heart. The food was fine.

With the poisoning a failure, they panicked and shot him, but ineptly, knocking him unconscious. They then began to freak out about what to do about his body. Rasputin meanwhile regained consciousness and began to attempt to crawl to safety, bleeding heavily in the snow.

They followed him out and shot him two more times, including once at close range in the head, finally killing him. But now they were out in the open, people had heard the shots, and there was blood everywhere. Their attempt to keep things secret was totally blown.

Still panicking, they stuffed his body into a sack and drove to one of the only un-frozen parts of the river and attempted to dump his body. His body hit the side of the bridge on the way down, and one of his boots was knocked loose, landing conspicuously on the ice.

They had also forgotten to tie any weights to the body, so instead of sinking it bobbed along under the ice and became stuck just a few hundred meters away, where it was discovered a few days later, frozen absolutely solid. It was gross.

There are rumors that the corpse's lungs were full of water, indicating that he had survived all 3 shots and finally drowned. We have the autopsy records and this is also just entirely made up. The lungs were dry, because they shot him in the head, and he was just a dude.

The immediate aftermath of Rasputin's death was that the scapegoat was dead and yet the bad decisions continued. Long story short, the Russian people revolted, deposed Nicholas, and two years later he, Alexandra and their whole family were executed by the new government.

But Rasputin's legend was by this point self-propelled. People who knew him sold books, interviews, speaking tours, movie deals. His eldest daughter Maria sold multiple memoirs of him. Remember how I said Rasputin is weirdly modern? She died in Los Angeles, in *1977*.

And so Rasputin's legacy is almost totally fabricated. He was a creepy sexual predator who had very piercing eyes and was good at coming up with religious-sounding mumbling. The king and queen were fond of him. Almost everything else is wildly exaggerated or simply false.

Rasputin was invented, to sell books and movies. The most amazing thing about him is that so many people in the 1930s and onward were willing to believe a mystic had magical powers and enormous influence despite there being no evidence at all. It was all hysteria and rumor.

Quite.