Dan Snow's History Hit - Rasputin: Myth & Manhood

Episode Date: October 25, 2022

Was Rasputin really Russia’s greatest love machine? Did he have any healing powers? And why might his penis be pickling in a jar?In this episode, we are drawing this mystical man out of his cloud of green smoke to find out which of the things we know about him might actually be true.Kate Lister from Betwixt The Sheets is joined by Douglas Smith, historian, translator and expert in Russian history, who has emerged from the archives with a new interpretation of this cartoon baddy.*WARNING there are naughty words and discussions of sexual coercion in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hello, my lovely Betwixters. This is Kate Lister jumping in, as per usual, to give you your fair do's warning. Fair do's? We are talking about sex and penises and cults and magic and all manner of stuff today because we are talking about Rasputin. If you're still with me and this is still something that you want to sign up to, then let's go, baby. I'm ready if you are. Go baby, I'm ready if you are. You might have heard of him from Dancing Late at Night to Rasputin by Boney M. Or perhaps you've encountered him as the cartoon babby in the film Anastasia. Or maybe, maybe, you were lucky enough to see his member floating in a jar.

But just who was Rasputin? How many of the rumours about him are true? Join me, Kate Lister, betwixt the sheets of the Russian courts, to find out more. Why do you look so mad? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning it up and pushing the button. Come on, ERA! Come on, ERA! Come on, ERA! Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.

Goodness, what beautiful times. Goodness has nothing to do with it, does it? Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, with me, Kate Lister. A preacher? The leader of a sex cult? A healer? The Tsarina's bit on the side? Russia's greatest love machine? A political influence? Hmm. Rasputin was a man who wore many hats, wasn't he? My producers were out and about asking strangers random questions once again. This time, what do they think of when they think of Rasputin?

Oh, the song that came out last summer, Ra Ra Rasputin. And I think he had quite a grisly murder. That's what I think of. Anastasia, straight away. Is that the guy who just floats around? He's all that massive penis, isn't he? Quite a varied response there, but any of these have some truth to them. Betwixt the sheets with me for this episode is a man who can tell us all, Douglas Smith,

here to talk about the reality of Rasputin's relationships with the Russian royals, his religious teachings, and to question why is he surrounded by so many rumours over a hundred years after he died? Thank you for joining me betwixt the sheets. Let's get into it. Hello and welcome to Douglas Smith. How the hell are you? I'm doing well. It's a little hot here in Seattle, but we're holding together. Not as bad as you all had it, I think. No, we freaked out completely. We can't cope with that. A couple of weeks ago, it hit 40 degrees. And if you'd been on social media and seen Britain tweeting or Facebooking, you would have thought that we were in some kind of seventh circle of hell and everyone was laughing at us. I was not laughing. I felt your

pain. I was with you every step of the way. We don't have air conditioning. We don't know what to do. No, no. And you shouldn't have to. No, we shouldn't. I'd love to talk to you about how you can cope in the heat, but I'm even more excited to talk to you about how you can cope in the heat but i'm even more excited to talk to you about rasputin always happy to talk about gregory yefimovich that's a it's a hell of a name isn't it gregory emiva rich rasputin yes it is yes the way the russians would say this gregory yefimovich rasputin which sounds even more ominous it does doesn, doesn't it? But like maybe in Russian, it sounds quite cute. But to our ears, that definitely sounds like it needs some kind of like Darth Vader theme music accompanying it, doesn't it?

Exactly, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's creepy sounding. It's creepy sounding. And he is such a strange and mysterious figure from history. He's known as the Mad Monk. He's known as, like, just evil. He has this reputation as evil.

I saw this strange old photograph taken in East Germany in the 50s of some sort of strange, weird wax museum of sort of the worst villains in history. And I think they had a figure of Rasputin standing next to, if it wasn't Hitler, it was Himmler or something. And I thought, you can't get much worse than that.

That's it, isn't it? He's made the top ten there. Yes. Let's start with the basics. Who was he? Where did he come from? Well, he was born into a peasant family in western Siberia, later part of the 19th century. And really, you would have thought he would have had a life like all of his ancestors,

basically working the land, farming, fishing, and that sort of thing. But he had some sort of strange religious experience as a young man and set off wandering all over Russia in search of religious enlightenment, which set him on a path that took him to places that no one ever could have imagined. No, I mean, where he ended up from where he started, nobody could possibly have predicted that because he was born a peasant in Siberia. Do we know what this religious experience was that he had? What happened to him that made him go, I'm going to be a monk? We really don't know. We don't know. We don't know if he had some sort of a vision.

We don't know if he was influenced by experience of other sort of peasant holy men or priests or that sort of thing. So much of his past is literally shrouded in myth and legend. And we don't know, like the first 30 years of his life really are a giant black hole. And people have tried to fill it in with all sorts of outlandish stories and tales and things. And I spent six years digging in archives and reading everything ever written about the guy. And I was only able to glean a few unknown facts that he was, for example, as a teenager, he was thrown in the local jail for insulting the mayor of the town he was from. But there was very little to go by.

But he was, I think in some ways, we can say he was from. But there was very little to go by. But he was, I think, in some ways, we can say he was probably a bit of a rebellious teenager, a bit of a troublemaker, didn't really respect authority. I think those are things that we can say for certain. And these are things that I think that definitely show up later in his biography. I mean, definitely not a good character for a peasant in Siberia. Rebellious, has a problem with authority. No, that's not going to make a good peasant. Well, he was very independent.

That's one thing that really stands out is he was someone who was sort of like, I'm going to make my own rules. I don't care what has been done in tradition in the past. I don't care what the nobles say. I don't care what the government officials say. I'm going to strike out and live my life as I see it, which is really, truly remarkable. And that's the thing I think I've tried to do when I studied him and wrote about him was to get away from this idea that he was so evil and vindictive and dangerous and nefarious that there was this element of basically saying our society is

corrupt and I refuse to live by its corrupt morals and manners and laws. And there's something in a way attractive about that even. I like that about your book is that you are maybe not attempting to redefine or save him, but you're sort of trying to move him away from this. He should be stood next to Hitler in a waxwork museum type of assessment, aren't you? Exactly. That he was a rebel and that there's a lot to be admired there. Definitely. I think he was made into a scapegoat for all of Russia's troubles, right? He was blamed for everything, especially the downfall of the Romanov dynasty. And then this obviously leads into, you know, the horrible revolution and civil war. And everybody wanted to blame this on this one peasant holy man. They wanted to put all of this weight on his narrow shoulders. And I didn't set out to prove that

wrong. I set out to try to figure out what the truth was. But I couldn't imagine when I started that something as complex as the revolution and the fall of a 300-year-old monarchy can all be blamed on one person. That just isn't how history works. No, it doesn't sound quite right, does it? I mean, if he'd never been there, do you think that the revolution still would have happened and the Romanovs still would have met a sticky end in a basement? That's a good question and one that I struggled a lot with. I came down on the side that if it hadn't been Rasputin, Nicholas and Alexander would have found someone to take his place. I think there was this hole there in their lives that they needed filled. And they had earlier before Rasputin, there was this strange French mystic charlatan who came along.

I didn't know that. Yes, and he literally was their confidant, their advisor. He was a necromancer. He claimed all sorts of mystical powers. His name was Monsieur Philippe, and he was very scandalous. Members of the royal family were outraged that Nicholas and Alexandra had taken this Frenchman into their confidence. He claimed that he could rub his hands over the empress's belly to determine the sex of the child

in the womb. Oh, that old chestnut. Yes, exactly. So he was kicked out of court due to pressure from the royal family. But before he left to go back to France, he told Nicholas and Alexandra, just you wait, a friend will come to you, be prepared. And so he sort of planted the seed in their minds that there would be another and they waited. And it wasn't long before the strange holy man from Siberia appeared. And they sort of believed in this prophecy that Monsieur Philippe told them. So they had a type then. It just seemed that they just were attracted to these slightly scandalous mystic men. Yes, they were definitely into this kind of stuff, especially Alexandra. And this is, it isn't, again, just her, but sort of fantasiakla Russia,

like other parts of Europe and even the United States, maybe. People were fascinated by the occult, by the mystical, by strange powers and things like that. And so they were very much part of the intellectual zeitgeist, if you will, and were really deep into exploring these strange, irrational currents that were then very popular. Let's go back to teenage Rasputin, who is going through puberty in Siberia. We don't know how he comes to religion, but something happens. He gets married, doesn't he? Yes, he does get married at a relatively, not young age for a peasant.

I mean, the average peasant's life wasn't too long anyway. But yes, he got married to a woman named Praskovia. He stayed married to her his whole life, and they had three children. We never hear much about her, do we? We don't know much about her. She was always sort of in the background. He never really, he brought her to Petersburg maybe once or twice, that we do know. But generally she stayed home in Siberia and was very much kind of a figure that was not talked about, not discussed. And she had very little to say apparently.

She was a very sort of demure, self-effacing figure. But you'd have to be, wouldn't you? So it's not like the high society were inviting the Rasputins over for tea regularly. Well, they invited him over because he was a creature of salon culture in the capital. And the sort of aristocrats were fascinated by this figure. You know, there was an enormous cultural gulf, social gulf between the Europeanized elite in the capitals versus the way the vast majority of the Russian peasants lived. And so for princes and princesses and counts and what have you in Petersburg to invite a peasant into their homes and to listen to him speak and to watch him eat. It was like some sort of experience at the zoo, you know, it was an outer worldly thing. And they

were fascinated in some weird sort of way by these people like Rasputin, because there were more than just him moving around in society at the time. So it was almost some sort of strange fascination that the elites had for these simple Russian creatures, if you will. Obviously, I would never say that revolution and murdering your leaders is a good idea. But when you're in a position where it's considered a novelty to have a poor person over so you can all sit there and go, oh, my God, look how he eats. Look how the poor person eats. That is a society with a spectacular gulf between the classes, isn't it? Yes, definitely.

And he was very aware of this. You know, it's interesting. People often assume that he was illiterate and all that, but actually he could read and write. Okay. His penmanship was atrocious. You have to turn the letters, pages around upside down five times to figure out which way is written. Have you seen the letters that he wrote? Oh, yes. I worked with them in the archives in Russia, and they're atrocious. I had to get help from sort of handwriting experts to decipher a lot of it.

But among his writings are things where he denounces exactly these aristocrats as basically blood sucking parasites who live off the labors of the, you know, the Russian masses sort of thing. parasites who live off the labors of the you know the russian masses sort of thing and so he was on one hand attracted to this elite society fascinated by it and at the same time he was appalled by what he saw as their basically lazy ways by their loss of connection to deep russian traditions and russian habits and practices and religion and things like that. So he sort of had this sort of strange interaction, which leads up to his death, which I'm sure we'll talk about, with the elite society of Russia. What was it like for you as someone that's researching Rasputin for the first time that

you got to hold a letter that was in his hand, that you knew he'd touched that piece of paper? What was that like as a historian? It's one of those things that I really live for i love digging in archives i love holding the actual documents i think even more fascinating than the letters is i found in one archive a pencil drawing that he did of himself oh wow and it's dated uh where he did it it was again at one of these society homes in petersburg and he did like a It was, again, at one of these society homes in Petersburg. And he did like a little caricature of himself in pencil and gave it to his hostess as a parting gift.

It looks like it was written or drawn by about a four-year-old. But you know, it's interesting, not to diverge too far, but I used to work on Catherine the Great, another fascinating figure in Russian history. And I remember holding original things that she had written, you know, in 1770, whatever, in the archives in Russia. And that was a truly, it's kind of gives you chills. Yeah, like you don't quite know what to do. Yeah, just like, I once held something that had Elizabeth I's signature on it, and I was overwhelmed with this urge to lick it. I don't know if I wanted to lick it. lick it. I don't know if I wanted to lick it. It's like my brain couldn't cope with it. It just malfunctioned. And just, yeah, but I didn't, by the way. And that's why you have to be supervised

to look at these things. Yeah, exactly. And Rasputin licked a lot of people. But before we get to that, so he's married, is in Siberia. How does he end up in St. Petersburg drawing pictures of himself for high society ladies? What happens? Well, he becomes what's known in Russian as a strannik, which is a holy pilgrim. And he was not alone. There were a lot of these folks in late 19th, early 20th century Russia, peasants who literally sort of picked up, left home and would travel on foot from church to church, monastery to monastery, in search of religious enlightenment. And he would do this all over the vast Russian Empire. And it was sort of his university, if you will. It's where he learned about the Gospels. It's

where he learned about Scripture. It's where he had long conversations about the nature of God, the nature of religious experience with priests and other holy men and characters like that. And it's also where he came in contact with all layers of Russian society, from beggars and convicts and thieves all the way up to bishops and, you know, lords and ladies, if you will. And it's where he probably developed his great, truly unique ability to perceive people's individual characters, if you will, their troubles, their personalities, what they were going through. He had this ability to read people that was truly uncanny and that even his enemies had to acknowledge that he had.

So he did this for many, many years, and priests and higher-ups in the clergy began to talk about the strange mystic from Siberia and his reputation began to grow and he would be given letters of recommendation from clergy to go to another church to go to another monastery and eventually his name spread all the way to Petersburg to the capital and it was there that he made contact with some of the highest members of the Russian Orthodox Church who then helped to lead him directly into the palace.

Did he have any formal religious training? I mean, had he trained as a priest? Or was he just kind of like a religious wildcard, like the wandering mystic? Was that his thing? He was a wandering mystic. You know, sometimes people refer to him as a monk or a priest, but he had no, he never took orders. He was not a monk. He was not ordained. He was a wandering mystic. You know, sometimes people refer to him as a monk or a priest, but he had no, he never took orders. He was not a monk. He was not ordained. He was literally sort of a personification of the word of God, if you will. That's sort of how he saw himself.

Ah, zero qualifications at all. Well, in a way, yes. Zero, like, official qualifications. Official, official. I went to the University of Life. Exactly, official. I went to the University of Life. Exactly, exactly. Which is what people were hungry for, because not many people obviously know these sorts of details, but most Russian clergymen at the time were very sort of dry, dusty, scholastic, bureaucratic.

That doesn't sound like the church. It was boring. It was utterly boring. church? It was boring. It was utterly boring. And people were seeking some sort of spark of the fire of religion, if you will, right? The passion of religion. And he gave it to them in spades, and they just like lapped it up. What was it that he was doing that so caught people's attention? Could he perform miracles? Was he just a really good preacher? What was he doing that was getting him noticed? He was a preacher. He had this sort of earthy way of taking ideas in the Bible and imbuing them with this sort of earthy, rustic, peasant sensibility. He could go on and on about the beauty of Russian nature and how this was a reflection of God and God's will

and God's love for mankind and this sort of thing. So he could take things that people had read about or heard sermons about, and he could imbue them with an urgency and a sense of reality and life that the typical priest at the local church was simply unable to do, and that turned them on. And they also loved to see how he could interpret their own lives for them. As I mentioned before, he had this strange ability to read people, and he would meet somebody, and he would hold their hand, and he would say, you're troubled. I can tell you're troubled. And they would, oh, how did you know, Grigori? How did you know? And he'd say, I see it in your eyes. I read it in the feel of your hands.

And how much of this was real, how much of this was a game he was playing is sometimes hard to unpack. I think there's an element of the showman about him. He was aware of the effect he had on people, and he played this up. He played up his peasant nature his peasant background aware that this had a profound impact yeah exactly that's interesting to hear you say that because that's sort of what comes to in a lot of descriptions about him is it's maybe not quite so much what he was preaching although that's interesting but he seems to entrance people which i suppose is

something i don't want to say that he's a cult leader but it's something that you read about a lot with cult leaders is they sort of enchant people they entrance them they hold this energy over them almost yeah and i think your use of the word energy is perfect because everybody especially in those early years when he arrives in petersburg around 1905 on this energy, that he was like a taut bow, that there was just this intensity about him, this energy about him that literally seemed to flow from his fingertips. His movements were quick and jerky. We sometimes get this image of Rasputin as this big, heavy, oafish, lumbering sort of fellow. You know, there's a lot of movies

about Rasputin, and the worst casting ever was one that was done a few years ago, in which Gerard Depardieu played Rasputin, this 300-pound creature. He was thin, he was lean, he was taut, and he had this energy, as you say. It came through his body, it came through his motions, it came through the way he would move through space, and as everyone always comments on, it came his eyes those eyes are freaky they are freaky photos yes they are just straight out at the viewer aren't they everyone says that they were very deep set and piercing and that they had this sort of energy and that he could hold someone with his gaze and make them extremely uncomfortable or feel like they were the center of the world

and the center of all his attention. And he knew, again, how to work that. I often wonder when I look at those photographs of him, was he posing for that camera? Could he turn that stare on and turn that stare off? Or was it just like that all the time? Because it's a hell of a gaze that he's got there. I think as the years went on, again, you talked about his brand.

He was very conscious of his brand. And I think as the years went on, he could strike the pose, so to speak. Yeah. And then probably when he was done in the photographer's studio, he could probably turn it off and walk out and lumber off down the street somewhere. I think it very much became part of his whole shtick, if you will. I think, I mean, there must have been like just a regular everyday side to him of just, you know, Grigori just wants to go down the shop to get a pint of milk.

And he can't have been staring at people like that the whole time. No, he wasn't. But what's interesting is he becomes this figure of pop culture at the time. Russia, for the first first time develops an independent free press after 1905. And there's a desire and thirst to sell newspapers. And he becomes a star of the paparazzi. He'll be out walking around Petersburg. Oh, God, they'd love him. Yeah, and they'd be like, you know, oh, Grigory Efimovich, turn around, let's get your picture. So there are pictures of him on the street. He would be harassed by local journalists and stuff to the point where he was always trying to shake them.

So there's a certain very modern quality about his relationship to the press and the way that he would both try to hide himself, shield himself from the prying eye of journalism, at the same time would play to them and try to use them to sort of, you know, improve his image and sort of tell his own story. Do you think it was kind of like, like the cult of celebrity is quite something. I mean, everyone talks like if you meet a famous person, you are starstruck. And if you meet a very famous person, or if you happen to have held their letters in a library, you do have like a, oh my God, I can't believe it.

And I suppose I've just finished reading a biography of Marilyn Monroe. And it talks about a lot about this public image of her that sort of preceded her, and she couldn't get away from it. So everyone was thinking of sex when they met her because that was her image. Do you think that was like Rasputin as well? Is that because he's got this carefully choreographed, mystic, slightly sensual, naughty risque, that it sort of preceded him and helped him with that stare and that energy?

Definitely, definitely. I don't know if everyone thought about sex right away, unlike Marilyn, but they did think about being in the presence of someone famous because, you know, not many people actually probably met him, had a chance to be in the same room with him, but he was in all the newspapers. In fact, people talked about him so much that there was a famous aristocratic hostess in Petersburg who hung a sign in her drawing room that said, here, a certain man will never be discussed. Because so many, everyone wanted to talk about Rasputin. And she was like, I've had it already. Enough with this guy.

He that must not be named. Yes, exactly. He was that famous. You said that, like, you wouldn't think of sex when you saw Rasputin. And I can understand why, because he's got a hell of a gaze, but he also looks like he's been dragged through a hedge. And apparently he stank. Is that right?

He smelt really bad. Is that not true? No. I mean, one of the things that I found in my research is all of these nasty things, especially about his physical appearance that you know he stank to high heaven smelled like a goat was something smelled like a goat dirty fingernails and no sense of personal grooming and all that so much of that i really think was created by the upper classes who refused to recognize that a peasant could be clean you know presentable there was it was sort of a class

hatred that they couldn't stand we know that he would go to the public baths all the time and basically he did keep himself clean and he didn't stink to high heaven i think you know he was going to the baths not only for personal hygiene he was going there for other things as well but this notion that he smelled like a goat is, I think, something that was completely unfair. Exactly. Right. He did a lot of stuff, but he didn't smell like a goat. So we can put that one to one side. Douglas and I will be back in just a bit. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends.

Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Someone else I read about him. Did he masturbate in public? I think he probably enjoyed rubbing in public.

I don't know how far it went. It doesn't have to go too far for it to be a bit weird. He was weird. I think that is something... Yes, yes, he was quite weird. He was weird, yeah. He was weird. I think he was less apt to masturbate in public.

I think he was more apt to try to get his hands on as many women in public as he could. He never would have survived the Me Too moment. He was... God, no. God, no. He loved to grope. He loved to pat. He loved to squeeze.

He loved to rub. And he would do all of this in public. Any woman within arm's length was apt to be inappropriately fondled i think it's fair to say and women would you know some women found it apparently enjoyable other women would literally look it was like musical chairs you know like oh god i can't sit over there or he's gonna get next to me and i can't bear the thought of it so yeah, yeah, yeah, he was creepy. He was definitely creepy. He was a lech. Yeah, okay, so he was a lech. We're not quite sure, because in the film with Alan Rickman as Rasputin,

he definitely jumps on the table and at least gets his penis out. But he was weird enough on his own. How about this? That part of his teachings was in order to get closer to God, you have to be forgiven by God. Therefore, we should sin, because then we can ask for forgiveness. Was that one of his? Yeah, well, there's this saying that apparently wasn't just Rasputin,

but others were using it at the time. Basically, it goes, you know, if you don't sin, you can't repent. And if you don't repent, you can't be saved. You heard it here first, folks. It's a nice, clever way to, I suppose, talk someone into bed. But even his own daughter, Maria, who survived and ended up living in Los Angeles and was in the circus and all sorts of crazy things, fascinating figure in her own right, and wrote memoir or two about her father, admitted that he was a man of great passion. It's a nice way of

putting it. Yeah. A man of deep feeling, a man with profound urges and instincts, and that he acted on them. So if his own daughter was saying that, I think we can assume that he was doing a good deal more than even she could have imagined. So yeah, you know, he was incredibly sex driven. Of that, there is no doubt. No, he was Russia's love machine. And I read that apparently his wife was asked, don't you mind about having all these infidelities? To which she responded that he has enough for all. Exactly.

She said, we don't know if it's apocryphal or not, but it sounds plausible that, yeah, someone back in Siberia said, oh, you know, oh my God, how do you put up with this? And she said, yeah, exactly. Somebody the effect of, well, you know, Gregorio Foria Fima but she's got enough in him for a lot of people you know on the other hand maybe she was like just get him off me you know as long as as long as I get a break you know maybe I don't know she must have just been like it's not a problem guys just

exactly keep him over there take him off my hands Apparently, as well, he used to say to women that he was seducing, I don't degrade you, I purify you. That's a line. There's a lot of comment in memoirs of women who apparently knew him extremely well, in which they would write that he would try to take their sins from them and place them upon himself. Sort of, I will remove you of sin. Oh, Gregory.

But that requires a physical process. And maybe he would say, I won't even necessarily enjoy this, but I am in a way cleansing you and releasing you of sinful passion. Yes. Again, interesting logic. What a scallywag. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

Well, I'm sure he thought he was doing everyone a favor so we've got this sort of novelty mystic peasant guy running around saint petersburg groping anything that'll stay still how on earth does he end up with the royal family how does he get anywhere near them well because he as mentioned earlier, he becomes this man of fascination for leading clergy in the capital, as well as various aristocrats who are also drawn to these mystical holy men and spiritualism and the occult and all this sort of irrational stuff that was floating in the air at the time. that Nicholas and Alexandra are into this kind of thing and they know that the Frenchman, Monsieur Philippe, their former, I don't even know what you might call him, but you know, mystic cult leader or whatever, had told him that, you know, another will come after me. I will leave but another will come after me. So they literally introduce him to Nicholas and Alexandra at court and they are immediately taken with him. They are fascinated.

They call him a man of God, and they start to hang on his every word, particularly Alexandra. Nicholas, I would say, a bit less so. Crucial to, I think, that relationship that Rasputin has with the royal couple, you know, typically people say, oh, well, it's because the heir to the throne, Alexei, had hemophilia, and Rasputin could keep the boy alive, and told him that if I leave, the boy will die. There's a bit of truth in that, but even more important from what I discovered in my research

is Alexandra was convinced that her husband had no balls, to put it quite openly, that he was weak, that he was always under the thumb of one of his ministers, he had no spine, and she was always under the thumb of one of his ministers. He had no spine. And she was basically looking for a surrogate real man. And Rasputin's got balls for everyone. Exactly.

And she looked to Rasputin to be the support to her husband, the strength behind the throne, if you will, that she felt was so lacking in Nicholas. And this comes through really clearly in letters that Alexander wrote to Nicholas. Yeah, it's very clear. Do you think it was sexual? Because that was the rumor that spread and it spread like wildfire. Like, do you think there's anything in that? No, no. There's nothing to suggest that there was any sort of sexual relationship between the Empress Alexandra and Rasputin. Alexandra herself was very much a very uptight, prudish Victorian woman. I don't think she ever would have thought of cheating on Nicholas,

who she truly loved. She truly loved her husband. She was not looking for sexual fulfillment. And as for Rasputin, he despised in many ways the aristocracy, the nobility, the elite, but he was a true patriot of the Romanovs. And he really believed in the autocracy. He believed in the royal family. He believed that it was his duty to try to serve them and to be of help to them. And I don't think he ever would have crossed that line to view Alexandra as a sexual creature, someone for him to try to bed, if you will.

Same thing was said about the daughters, that, you know, Rasputin tried to sleep with the daughters or, in fact, did sleep with, you know, Olga or Tatiana, the elder daughters. No basis, in fact, and I can't imagine that he ever would have crossed that line. Because, I mean, you can say what you want but he was smart he was a smart man and he must have known what he was risking if he had done that if he had even tried to do that I think definitely early on I think in his later years he becomes pretty addled with booze oh he was a drinker as well heavy drinker and this sort of caught up with him in his later years. And I think it started to cloud his vision, to be honest. But, you know, these stories about Alexandra and Rasputin, this is part of, again, a larger narrative that was used to discredit the Romanovs, right? Right, of course. bankrupt, as morally corrupt. And one way of doing that was to present Alexandra as, you know, basically the whore of this Russian charlatan. This is also something you see, like, for example,

in the way Catherine the Great has been described. Marie Antoinette as well. Marie Antoinette. Again, it's very much this, you know, misogynistic attack on women and women with power. It ties into that sort of history, I would say. It's just kind of saying that she was a massive slag, wasn't it? And like trying to discredit it like that. Exactly. Yeah. But the thing is, is a lot of people started to believe it because it was a rumor that was talked about so often that it gained currency and a lot of people were convinced it was true. So tell me about the son who had hemophilia, which is a condition where the blood doesn't

clot. and it's very dangerous, isn't it, is that you can bleed out pretty quick with this condition. And it said that Gregory Rasputin could stop him bleeding and keep him alive. Is that true, or is that all smoke and mirrors? It's really murky, and I spent a lot of time trying to understand that part of the story and figure out what might have been going on. The heir to the throne, Tsarevich Alexei, was a hemophiliac, which he had inherited through his mother. And she felt incredible guilt about this fact,

that she was responsible, you know, not her fault, obviously, but through her genes, he inherited this horrible, incurable disease. He was the only son she had so he was the only heir to the throne and as the wife of the czar that was her one job was to produce a healthy male heir and i think she was as a mother was horribly wracked with guilt about what had happened and the ill health of her son and she did look to Rasputin, not that he could cure Alexei because there was no cure, right? There's no cure for this, but that he may protect his life and keep him alive.

And there are two or three instances where Alexei had these bleeding episodes. And they're not external bleeding. It's internal bleeding. So he would fall and blood vessels would be ruptured. And then he would start to bleed internally. And it would lead to incredible pain and pressure. I mean, excruciating pain. And Nicholas and Alexandra would be, you know, at his bedside and he would be screaming.

And you can imagine there was nothing they could do to stop the pain. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. the pain. murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. And the doctors would be poking and prodding and trying to figure out what to give him, possibly even something like aspirin,

which would not necessarily help at all. And what Rasputin did was, if one thing he did was correct, was he always assured Nicholas and Alexandra that Alexei would live, that he would not die, and that the doctors, if nothing else, should just leave him alone. And I'm not the first one to say this. Robert Massey, the brilliant American historian who wrote Nicholas and Alexandra, the ultimate book on the royal family, posited that it was this which meant the boy was left alone. They stopped turning him around and poking and prodding, which could have allowed for the blood to coagulate, for the crisis to pass, that this was a factor. And I think there's probably truth in that.

I think another area that's interesting to explore with this is the whole mind-body connection, which to some people sounds like kind of hoo-ha, but, you know, it's not Harvard and other major universities in the UK or the US now study this. I really believe that Rasputin's telling Alexandra and Nicholas, don't worry, the boy will survive, helped to calm the parents. And the calming influence was something that Alexei himself picked up on.

And the degree to which that may have lowered the stress and especially lowered the blood pressure may have also had some kind of role in helping to mitigate these crises but the fact is is Rasputin never cured him of hemophilia and he remained a hemophiliac until obviously his brutal murder after the revolution so it sounds from this like Rasputin was doing some good stuff so how did he get to be public enemy number one to the point where people wanted to assassinate him? What was he doing that really pissed people off? Well, I think...

Apart from shagging everyone. There's the whole shagging. There's evidence that he was picking up sex workers on the streets of Petersburg. That did not endear him to a lot of folks. I really come down on the fact that what really got them angry was the fact that Nicholas and Alexandra were extremely private people, even though they were very public figures, right, as the emperor and the empress. They led the sort of quiet bourgeois life with their children. They didn't like to open the doors of the palace to sort of the key ministers in the government, of the palace to sort of the key ministers in the government, to the upper echelons of aristocratic society, to the generals and that sort of thing. And they lived this very reserved,

closed life, which angered the leading families of the realm. And then all of a sudden they let in this peasant and they let him into their most intimate private spaces and share their lives with this man. So there was this great deal of jealousy and envy. It's led to gossip. It led to rumor. And I think there was this sort of clear class hatred among the nobles and the aristocrats that they were not allowed into the lives

of the emperor and the empress, and he was. And so gossip spread in the salons, and then it goes from the salons, it gets into the lives of the emperor and the empress, and he was. And so gossip spread in the salons, and then it goes from the salons, it gets into the newspapers, and from there it takes off. And what, on one level, this gossip was attempting to do was to make it such that Nicholas and Alexandra would have to send him away, that the scandal of this man would become so great that they would be forced to get rid of him. Because the people who are creating the lies started to believe the lies. And they

use these as tools to try to drive a wedge between Nicholas and Alexandra and Rasputin. So that's the people kind of on the political right. And then the people on the political left, revolutionaries and critics of the regime who want to bring the regime down, they start telling basically the same sorts of lies and stories as a way to discredit the throne, to sully the image of the monarchy and show this system is bankrupt, that if a figure like this, a debauched, sorcerer, charlatan, sex deranged maniac, pervert. Smells like a goat. Smells like a goat.

Is the real power behind the throne? Well, then this system cannot be saved and this system needs to be overthrown. So this is where all of the imagery and the myth and legend is born. That makes sense, actually. I can see how the aristocrats, if they think it's a novelty to get a poor person and watch them eat, they would freak out completely at the idea of a peasant actually having any kind of political influence. And other people would just see him as a debauched wizard. Like what on earth is going on? So who decides to do him in? Let's talk a bit about his death, because that is as much a part of his mystique as a as the beard in the eyes i think exactly exactly well the plot that succeeds in december of 1916 and ends rasputin's life was not the first attempt to kill him there were several attempts to kill him

before and the weirdest one i direct people to my biography of Rasputin to read about this. This is just so freaking weird. It should be a movie or several books on its own. A noseless woman. It's off to a great start, right? Yes. A noseless woman with a veil over her face went up to him at home in Siberia

in the summer of 1914 and he thought she was a beggar. And he was always very generous. And so he reached into his pocket to give this woman begging a few coins. And with that, she pulled out from under her gown a huge knife, like 13 inches long, and thrust it into his belly twice, screaming, I've killed the Antichrist. I've killed the antichrist i've killed the antichrist oh my god amazingly rasputin survived this attack it's just utterly bizarre wait was she sent by somebody did she just do this on her own why doesn't she have a nose what's what's happening she was sent by a cross-dressing anti-semitic right-wing russian priest clear this up it's so weird like when i was

researching it i'd have to read some of these things five times like do i understand am i getting these right because it sounds so freaking bizarre but it's all true it's really true anyway so okay several people have tried to dispute and He survives all these weird attempts to kill him. It's Prince Felix Yusupov, another, I have to say, really odious figure, who comes up with the idea to finally do away with Rasputin once and for all in December of 1916. One of the richest men in the country, heir to a great fortune,

part of one of the oldest aristocratic clans in all of Russia. But he's a man without a purpose. He's the ultimate gross caricature of an idle, pointless aristocrat with no real reason for living. I think, yeah, I've dated a few of those. You maybe know some of them. Sort of a mama's boy. Definitely. Who knows that his mother hates Rasputin and basically decides to kill Rasputin

in part to try to ingratiate himself even more with his mother. And also he has these sort of vainglorious notions that by killing Rasputin, he will save the Romanovs, he will save Russia. It's all very bizarre. So he's the one who puts in motion the plot. He finds others to go along with him, including a cousin of the Tsar, Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, a right-wing politician named Pereshkevich, and they put together this plot to kill Rasputin.

Yusupov describes all this in his memoirs. He paints himself as the savior of Russia, as this incredibly brave man, as sort of Saint Michael, you know, slaying the dragon. It all gets very weird. It's all utter nonsense. Literally every page of the memoir is a lie piled on another lie. There's only one thing he says in his memoir that is true

in which he does admit that killing Rasputin was a cowardly crime, which is the only truthful thing he says. They lured Rasputin to the Yusupov Palace in Petersburg, claiming that they're inviting him to a party where he will get a chance to meet Yusupov's lovely young wife, and then they do him in in a dastardly way. And in fact, they then help to bring about the end of the dynasty

through this actual murder. Is the story that they gave him wine laced with cyanide and that didn't kill him and then they gave him cakes laced with cyanide and that still didn't kill him and then they gave him more wine laced with cyanide and that didn't kill him and eventually they all tried to stab him and that didn't kill him and then they threw him in the river and the autopsy was that he died by drowning is any of that true or is that just all the same he smells like a goat he's a magician stuff it's of the goat magician variety oh right what's what did happen

to him well so yeah they were going to try to poison him but the man who was going to supply the poison got cold feet so he didn't give him potassium cyanide he apparently gave them ground up aspirin that'd be why it didn't work really wasn't that effective maybe cleared any headache he might have had i'm feeling fantastic i feel pretty good but they did have him in the basement they did feed him cakes and wine but basically they shot him they shot him oh twice through the midsection well first they shot him once through the midsection and he fell to the floor. Apparently Yusupov was so amazed

that he had killed Rasputin that he ran upstairs to tell the co-conspirators what had happened, that they killed the devil, the Antichrist is dead. But what they didn't realize was that Rasputin had gotten up with this bullet that had gone all the way through him.

And he had gone part of the way upstairs and out a side door into the courtyard. So they went downstairs and they're like, he's gone. Where is he? And they see the doors open and they see, you know, a trail of blood. They go out into the courtyard and there's, you know, Rasputin trying to stagger away. They shoot him in the back and he falls. They go over to him in the snow. They flip him over. He's still breathing. And then, and you can see this, I saw the autopsy photographs, which were in a museum in Petersburg, the actual photographs of the body. They then went up to him and they put a pistol to his forehead and what the Russians call a control shot. They put a bullet through his head, killed him instantly then. Then they wrapped him in a carpet, threw him in a car, drove him out to

the edge of town. There was a hole in the ice there. They wrapped some chains around the body and the carpet and they dumped him in the water and he went under but this idea that he was impossible to kill was a story that you super created as a way to justify his actions and to puff himself up as this man of incredible strength and bravery but that does sound better like i killed the antichrist rather than i shot a drunk man in the back. I have to ask you before I let you go, and honestly, you've been so fascinating, but could you tell me about Rasputin's penis, please? I know where you're going with this. I can't help myself. Allegedly, it was enormous. That's one of the stories around him. And the other one is that it was cut off after he died it was pickled and sold at an auction is that nonsense yeah there's a lot out there about his member there

was a story at one time i think during his lifetime even that apparently he had a large wart on it and that was what caused women to go into ecstasy it was such frequency i i tried to find documentary proof of that but i failed yes no you know the autopsy report says that his body was intact yeah why would they cut it off if like if it was just the assassin like a trophy i guess like a trophy there was a story that was going around that at one point his penis had been cut off and that it was smuggled to the west after the revolution and that it was kept in a special little box or maybe a big box huge box and that it was this cult object that women in paris were passing around and would open up and i don't know grab or we regularly do that at parties women when the men aren't there

i've heard of these things. But anyway, if you go online, apparently his Johnson, as we would call it here in the States, is pickled in a large jar of formaldehyde in a museum of sex, sexology or whatever, in Petersburg. I hate to break it to people because I get this question a lot that... I bet you do. It's definitely not his, I'm afraid. Is it even human? I'm not an expert in that sort of thing.

I'm not qualified. I'm sorry, I don't know why I'm asking you that. You'll have to ask somebody else. I do not have an answer. But it's not Rasputin's? It's definitely not, no, sorry. The autopsy, he was completely intact. And why, if this was a political assassination,

would you cut that off? Exactly. I feel that we've busted a few Rasputin myths today. Well, I hope I didn't ruin your impression of the man. You couldn't. No, absolutely not. In fact, if anything, he's more fascinating. But if people want to find out more about you and your research, where can they find you? Go to douglassmith.info and you can see my books on Russia, including my biography of Rasputin. You know, I spent years of my life researching this man. I went to seven different countries

and archives everywhere. What I found is that the actual truth is weirder and more fascinating than these popular myths. When you dig down into what really was going on, you just keep scratching your head going, this just can't be, but it actually was true and it's infinitely more fascinating. And I've very much got that from you today. Thank you so much for joining me between the sheets, Douglas Smith.

Thank you. It's been my pleasure. Thank you for listening and thank you so much to Douglas for joining me. How good was he? We only just barely scratched the surface of that. I think we'll have to have him back again. But if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever it is that you get your podcasts. It really does help us out. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex, scandal and society.

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