The title says it all, the book goes though Rasputin's life briefly.
It starts and ends with Rasputin's death day, which in our calendar is dated the 30th of December 1916, but for them it was on the 17th of December, Rastik's birthday :)
Born in the small and sleepy village of Pokrovskoye, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, the peasant, prophet, religious mystic, fornicator holy man. Many of the book's accounts are piece of information provided by Rasputin's daughter Maria, whom wrote three books about her father.
Religious act or luck, Rasputin was talented in "guessing" future events, and healing sick people, he was confident in his statements and even when it didn't turn out just the way it was said, he had a way to mix the words to make it sound just as foreseen.
Due to his popularity, the Tsar (Nicholas II) and the Tsarina (Alexandra Feodorovna) invited him to pay a visit to see their son Alexei, whom was always sick due to hemophilia B. Rasputin was said to possess the ability to heal through prayer and was able to calm the parents and to give the boy some relief, in spite of the doctors' prediction that he would die. On the following day the Tsarevich showed significant signs of recovery. Speculation suggest that Rasputin's healing practice included the administration of aspirin, a pain-relieving analgesic available since 1899. Aspirin has also blood-thinning properties; it prevents clotting and promotes bleeding and would have worsened the hemarthrosis.
The Tsar was not all that convinced though, he had resisted the influence of Rasputin for a long time. At the beginning he had tolerated him because he dare not weaken the Tsarina's faith in him – a faith which kept her alive. He did not like to send him away, for if Alexie Nicolaievich had died, in the eyes of the mother he would have been the murderer of his own son. He influenced the Tsar strategies in politics, which when things were not going very well he was the one to be blamed for, a peasant shouldn't be getting involved with ruling Russia.
That's when he found himself with a lot of enemies, to name a few: Khionia Guseva, whom attempted to assassinate Rasputin, managing to stab him into his abdomen. The list includes the Tsarina's sister Olga, the Tsar mother, Iliodor, not to mention his killers: Prince Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, and Dr. Stanislaus de Lazovert
According to Yusupov he offered Rasputin petit fours poisoned with a large amount of cyanide. According to Purishkevich the Prince climbed the stairs three times, as Rasputin refused the cakes or to drink anything. Yusupov played his guitar and sang a few gypsy ballads at Rasputin's request, who was fond of gypsy music. After an hour, still waiting for Rasputin to collapse, Yusupov became anxious that Rasputin might live until the morning, leaving the conspirators no time to conceal his body. Yusupov went upstairs to consult the others and, determined to finish the job, he came back with a revolver. Rasputin was hit by a bullet that entered his left chest and penetrated the stomach and the liver; a second entered the left back soon after the first and penetrated the kidneys. Although both shots were fatal – he would have died within 20 minutes – they did not succeed in killing Rasputin.
At some time, when three of his fellow conspirators had left, Yusupov went down to check on the body and Rasputin seems to have opened his eyes and lunged at him. He is supposed to have grabbed Yusupov, tore an epaulette off his tunic and attempted to strangle him. Rasputin climbed the stairs to the ground floor stumbling in the courtyard. At that moment, according to Purishkevich, he fired at Rasputin four times while missing twice, who fell into the snow. A nervous Yusupov severely clubbed his victim.
When the body was wrapped in a curtain, the conspirators drove in the direction of Krestovsky island and at about 5:00am threw the corpse from a bridge into an ice-hole in the Malaya Nevka River . They forgot to attach weights to make the body sink, dropped his fur coat over the railing with the chains, and drove back, without noticing that one of Rasputin's galoshes, a rubber boot (size 10), was stuck between the pylons of the bridge.
When one of Rasputin's boots was found Maria and her sister affirmed it belonged to their father. It was late in the evening, but the police knew where to investigate. In the morning, Rasputin's beaver-fur coat and the body were discovered 140 meters away from the bridge in the frozen river. On the next day an autopsy on the thawed corpse by Kossorotov in a poorly lighted mortuary room in the evening established that the cause of his instant death was the third bullet in his brain, with strong evidence there was an exit wound at the back of the head.The first and third shots were made at close range, but had exited his body. The second bullet was extracted. There was alcohol in his body, no water found in his lungs and no cyanide in his stomach. There were a number of injuries, all of them caused after his death. Kossorotov found that Rasputin’s genitals were crushed.His right cheek was shattered when the body was thrown from the bridge.
His body was buried, and dig out three times, until the last time when it was put into a packing case that once held a piano, the next day it was loaded onto a truck and taken out of Petrograd. The story goes the truck broke down or the snow forced them to stop. The corpse is supposed to be taken into a field in the Vyborgsky District and burned.
More and more people came to the conclusion that the problem was not Rasputin but the weak-willed Emperor. After his death the memoirs of those who knew Rasputin became a mini-industry. The basement where he died is a tourist attraction. Numerous film and stage productions have been based on his life. He has appeared as a fictionalized version of himself in numerous other media, as well as having several beverages named after him.
On the 17th of July 1918 the Tsar Nicholas II, Tsarina Alexandra, their son, four daughters, and four non-family members were executed by the Bolsheviks
According to Dominic Lieven "more rubbish has been written on Rasputin than on any other figure in Russian history". It is true that he has left a lot of mystics behind. We will never know if he had slept with the Tsar, if he raped the girls he was accused of, if he was actually given poisoned cakes and drinks, how he based his predictions on, and so forth.
I generally enjoyed the book and learned more about him.
