Perhaps no one is more mysterious and mythic than Grigori Rasputin.
Born in an obscure Siberian peasant village in 1869, religious conversion and a career as a traveling saint and healer took Rasputin to the Russian royal court, where he became their closest confidant, chief adviser and one of the most powerful men in the empire.
But there was something fascinating and repulsive about a man as mysterious as Rasputin, even in his lifetime. As a result, the domestic and foreign media used him as a weapon to push their own agenda, leading to his becoming Russia’s most hated man and his assassination in 1916. Fictions have become so commonplace that they are still believed a century later.
We do not know for sure what happened that fateful night in late December 1916 when Rasputin was murdered. All we have is the unreliable account by the murderer himself: Prince Felix Yusupov, whose memoirs recount a story of evil, dark forces, and a noble and selfless act to rid the world of Rasputin.
Yusupov claims Rasputin was brought to his house and fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide. When Rasputin was unaffected, the Prince grabbed a gun and shot him in the heart. Then, thinking the job done and, in some stories, checking for a pulse and finding none, he went upstairs to tell his co-conspirators. When he returned, Rasputin supposedly leaped up back to life, throttled Yusupov, and tried to escape before being gunned down for good in the courtyard.
Although we will likely never know exactly how it happened, suggesting Rasputin came back from the dead can quite obviously be discredited, even more so when we consider the source. Indeed, the autopsy discredits Yusupov’s story immediately, detailing multiple gunshots, one to the head, and various bruises around the body, suggesting he was beaten. Yet even in death, the myth of the devil incarnate within Rasputin was too appealing to pass up.
