Grigori Rasputin
Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian peasant who became indispensable to the Russian imperial family because he could stop a boy bleeding. Born about 1869 in a village in Tobolsk province, he was a carter and a farmer with a reputation for drinking and theft, and underwent some kind of religious crisis around 1897 — after which he spent years wandering as a strannik, a holy pilgrim, walking to Mount Athos and Jerusalem. He arrived in St Petersburg in 1903 into a court society fascinated by mystics, and was introduced to Nicholas and Alexandra in 1905. The connection that mattered was medical. The tsarevich Alexei had haemophilia, a fact concealed as a state secret, and Rasputin was repeatedly present when episodes stopped — most famously at Spała in 1912, when the boy was expected to die and Rasputin sent a telegram from Siberia telling the doctors to leave him alone, and he recovered. Whether hypnosis, calm, or the withdrawal of aspirin explains it, the empress concluded that her son lived because of him. His influence on appointments grew after 1915, when the tsar took command at the front and left Alexandra governing, and ministers were made and unmade at a speed the war could not absorb. The rumours about him and the empress were probably false and were universally believed, which mattered more. He was murdered in December 1916 by a group of aristocrats including the tsar's cousin, shot and dumped in the Neva. The monarchy fell ten weeks later. The murder itself acquired a folklore of poison, repeated shootings and drowning that the autopsy does not support. What is not folklore is the political effect: the last men who might have saved the dynasty concluded that killing a peasant faith healer would do it, which is a fair measure of how little they understood.
- Lived: 1869 CE – 1916 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: religious_figure, court_advisor
