Forbidden History - The Fall of Rasputin

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

In part two, we uncover Rasputin’s grip on the Romanovs, the chaos his influence sparked across Russia and the many conspiracies surrounding his death... Cast List: Tony McMahon: Former BBC news producer, author, print journalist and historian  Eric Meyers: Narrator Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. This is the second part of our two-part series on Grigory Rasputin, the Mad Monk of Russia. In the first episode, we traced his rise from a Siberian peasant to the inner circle of the Romanov court, and we ended on the night of his murder, poisoned, shot, and cast into the frozen waters of the Neva.

But Rasputin's death was only the beginning of the story. In this episode, we'll peel back the layers of conspiracy and rumor that surround that night. And we'll ask the questions, did jealous nobles conspire alone? Or was it an act of espionage that delivered the fatal blow? Was it purely politics that sealed his fate? Or was there something more intimate, perhaps a relationship turned sour, a betrayal born of passion? And beyond Rasputin himself, we'll explore the downfall of the Romanov's, the revolution

that remade Russia, and the lifelong crusade of Rasputin's daughter Maria, a woman who never stopped fighting to clear her father's name. This is forbidden history, and this is the fall of Rassputin's. Rasputin. By the winter of 1916, Russia was a nation on the brink. The Great War had drained its strength. The Tsar's government had lost the faith of its people, and inside the gilded palaces of St. Petersburg, a Siberian peasant named Grigory Rasputin whispered advice into the ears of the Romanov dynasty. To many nobles, this was an outrage. Rasputin was a lowborn from the backwaters of Russia, yet he had the trust of the Tsar and Tsarina at a time

when their empire was falling apart. Today, we're joined by investigative historian, journalist, and author Tony McMahon. Many aristocrats wanted Rasputin dead. They wanted him out of the way. How dare this grubby monk exercise this kind of power over the monarch? At the heart of the plot to end Rasputin's life were two men, Prince Felix Yusupov and Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich. Both came from powerful families, and both saw Rasputin's influence as an insult to their status. Yusuf was a member of arguably the richest family in Russia, even richer than the Romanov's. The Yusuf family were possibly the biggest landowners.

in the world before the Russian Revolution. They had incredible palaces, four palaces, in St. Petersburg, and no expense spared on the decor. The House of Yusupov traced its fortune back centuries, with vast estates, oil wealth, and palaces filled with treasures from across Europe. By some estimates, the family's wealth even surpassed that of the Tsar himself. For Felix Yusupov to see a poor, unwashed mystic, commanding more influence in the royal court than the greatest landowners in Russia, was an unbearable humiliation.

Meanwhile, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich was no less illustrious. He was a grandson of Tsar Alexander II, raised within the Romanov dynasty itself. Handsome and aristocratic, Dmitri represented the very bloodline that Rasputin had managed to entwine himself with. For him, too, the monk's presence at court was both a scandal and a threat to the Romanov name. But resentment was not their only motive. Rumors swirled of Yusuf's flamboyant private life, and though Yusuf would later marry into the imperial family, Whispers suggested a more personal connection between him and Dmitri Pavlovich.

Nevertheless, he had a string of male lovers, and Grand Duke Dmitri is believed to have been one of those lovers. Yusufov even performed in drag at a cafe in St. Petersburg called the Aquarium. Apparently, he enjoyed putting on drag acts until one night his mother turned up to her horror. she saw her son on stage and his drag career came to a sudden end. Whether driven by pride, jealousy, or perhaps a genuine desire to save Russia, Yusupov and Pavlovich gathered like-minded conspirators. Their goal was simple. Remove Rasputin once and for all. On the night of December 30th, 1916, the conspirators put their plan

into action. Rasputin was invited to Yusuf's palace and led into a lavish basement chamber prepared for his arrival. Usapov wrote an account of what happened on that night in a biography called Lost Splendor and the death of Rasputin. According to Yusuf, the monk arrived eager, unsuspecting, ready to indulge. The bait was simple. Sweet cakes laced with poison. Why? wash down with his favorite drink, wine. And he describes Rasputin turning up, and just the two of them are sitting there at a table being served these cakes and wine.

Cakes without poison are served first. Two men eat the cakes, and then the cakes with poison, with cyanide, arrive. But things didn't go quite the way they had hoped. But he doesn't die, and Yusufov even says that he's been given enough Sinai to kill an entire monastery, and yet the mad monk refuses to die. Minutes dragged into hours, and Rasputin showed no signs of weakness.

Yusufov writes a very chilling account of that fateful night. He says, we were seized with an insane dread that this man was inviolable, that he was superhuman, that he couldn't be killed. It was a frightful sensation. He glared at us with his black, black eyes as though he read our minds and would fool us. Some accounts suggest that the poison was never real, that the arsenic was replaced with crushed aspirin. But in that moment, the accomplices could not take the risk. Panicking, Yusupov grabbed a revolver and fired. Rasputin collapses. For a moment, it seems over.

But then to the conspirator's horror, the monk stirs. He staggers to his feet, blood pouring from his body. He lurches toward the courtyard door. Desperate, they shoot again, one in the back, once in the head. Some accounts claim he was shot three times, others say four. But even then, uncertainty remained. The killers bound him, drags. his body through the snow to the frozen River Neva.

There, in the dead of night, they rolled him into a hole cut in the ice. Days later, when Rasputin's corpse was recovered, rumors spread that his hands were torn up and frozen in a clawing motion. To some, these scratches meant he had still been alive when thrown into the river, struggling to escape the ice before death finally took him. He is found there is an autopsy conducted and the doctors conclude that actually it was the shooting that killed him and that he did not drown. He was already dead when he was thrown into the river Never. There is no evidence of water in his lungs.

Interestingly, there's also no evidence of cake or sweets in his gut and no evidence of poison. But whether it was bullets, poison or icy waters that ended Rasputin, life, the question remains, was this truly the work of jealous nobles acting alone? Just months after Rasputin's body was pulled from the icy Neva, the empire he had haunted for a decade finally came crashing down. Russia's defeat in the Great War, famine in the cities, and the fury of striking workers drove the country into revolution. By the end of 1917, Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd,

promising peace, land, and bread. For the imperial family, however, there would be no peace. Nicholas, Alexandra and their children were taken captive, moved from one location to another as the revolution spread and civil war engulfed the country. In July 1918, in the basement of a house in Yakaternberg, the last Tsar of Russia, his wife, and their five children, were executed by Bolshevik guards. Their bodies were dumped in unmarked graves, hidden from the world. The dynasty Rasputin had once claimed to protect was no more. The prophecy he had given years earlier

that if he were killed by nobles, the Romanovs would fall within two years, had come to fruition. Whether coincidence or fate, Rasputin's murder marked not the salvation of the monarchy, but its end. But could it be possible that there were other powers moving in the shadows that fateful night who were also determined to silence him? Now there is a very credible theory that British intelligence was also involved that night when Rasputin was murdered. Why would Brieus, Britain want him dead.

By 1916, Russia was bleeding on the Eastern Front. Millions were dead. The army was exhausted, and the Tsar's grip on power was slipping. Rasputin had been against Russia becoming involved in World War I. He'd even written to the Tsar, warning him not to get involved in the war, saying that it would bring disaster. And in fact, this was a rare occasion where Tsar Nicholas, was actually quite angry at Rasputin for getting involved in advising him and giving him a policy advice

and he ignored it and took Russia into World War I with indeed disastrous consequences. Through it all, Rasputin urged Nicholas to withdraw from the war. Advice that if followed might have changed the course of history. But what Britain feared was that if Rasputin was listened to, If the Tsar and the Tsarina decided that the war was a bad thing and if they decided to have peace talks with Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, who was, after all, a cousin of the Tsar, that that would release 4 to 500,000 German troops from the Eastern Front

who could then be redeployed by Germany on the Western Front, putting the British and French forces in a very bad position indeed. If Rasputin's voice threatened the Allied war effort, then silencing him became more than an aristocratic plot, it became a matter of international strategy. And in the shadows of St. Petersburg, British intelligence was watching closely. Now, if it's true that the British were involved, then there's a key figure who may have been present when Rasputin was murdered. He may have even been involved. in the murder. And this is a British secret agent called Oswald Rainer. Now, Oswald Rainer,

intriguingly had been at Oxford University between 1909 and 1912 with Prince Yusufov. Yusuf was at Oxford and he was a member of the notorious Bullingdon Club, but he and Rayner knew each other. Their friendship gave him a unique window into the conspiracy. And when Rasputin lay dying in the snow, some have claimed it was Rainer himself who delivered the final shot to the head, ensuring the monk would never rise again. It's interesting to note that straight after the murder, Rainer left Russia in a hurry, and this certainly points to an element of British involvement. Also, and this is really intriguing, is that when Yusufov finally produces

his biography in exile years later, where he gives the full account, his account of Rasputin's killing, the book is translated into English by Oswald Rainer. Could Rainer and Yusupov have shaped the story to suit their own ends? Or were there other perhaps even more compelling reasons behind Rasputin's murder? After the break, we dive further into theories surrounding the death of Rasputin, stay tuned. Officially, Rasputin was killed because he threatened the monarchy's survival and Russia's war effort. But in the years that followed, whispers of another motive began to spread, one that

was far more personal. In 1917, Russia is taken over by the Bolsheviks under Vladimir Lenin, and it becomes the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and the Tsar and his family are assassinated and their bodies buried in secret. But many of the Russian nobility had fled long before then, including Prince Yusufov, who now is living in Paris. But stuck in Russia is a member of the royal family Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich. A senior Romanov and cousin of Tsar Nicholas the Second, Grand Duke Nikolai Mikhailovich wrote a letter just before his own execution by the Bolsheviks in 1919, which reflected on Rasputin's death. The Grand Duke had long despised

Rasputin, but his final words revealed something extraordinary. He says, I'm convinced there were physical manifestations of friendship in the form of kisses, mutual touching, and it may be even something more cynical. Rasputin's sadism is not open to doubt, but just how great Felix's carnal perversions were is still little understood by me, although before his marriage there were rumors in society about his lasciviousness. Could Rasputin's murder have been driven not only by politics, but by passion? The theory that Yusuf and Rasputin were in a same-sex relationship was hotly denied for years by Rasputin's daughter. daughter Maria Rasputina, and she pursued Yusufov launching legal actions against him over the

murder of her father, all unsuccessful. In the wake of her father's brutal murder, Maria had fled revolutionary Russia. Rasputin's daughter made it her life's mission to avenge the death of her father and to expose his killers and bring them to justice. However, like all too many people in this turn, people in this turbulent time, the political violence reached her too. In the 1920s, Maria Rasputina claimed that she was being pursued by a group of exiled Russian aristocrats, the Black 12, who she said wanted to kidnap and torture her because they believed that she could share her father's occult secrets.

For Maria, even the bizarre and the supernatural were part of the fight. This is something that's very important to say, and that is that many of these Russian aristocrats did believe in the occult, did believe in mysticism. So even though they killed Rasputin, they did believe that Rasputin had magical powers, and they wanted those magical powers. There is an incident where a virus of some description spreads among some of the exiled Russian aristocrats, and there are a couple of people who die as a result, and apparently some of them believed that this was some kind of. kind of curse that Rasputin had put on them from the grave and that he was effectively killing them from the afterlife. Maria continued to fight back.

In 1928, Maria Rasputina sued Prince Yusufov and Grand Duke Dmitri. The two men were now separated and hadn't seen each other for years. She sues them for $800,000 US dollars over the murder of Rasputin, but the case fails. and over and over again, her attempts to get justice are unsuccessful, and she's still pursuing her father's murderers. Maria's life in exile was as extraordinary as her father's had been in Russia. She toured with a pony act, and even as a lion-tamer in circuses across Europe and America.

Through it all, she never stopped writing and speaking, trying to convince the world that her father had been a healer, a holy man and not the monster his enemies portrayed. Maria Rasputina's career as a lion-tamer, is brought to an end when she's mauled by a bear while on stage in Indiana in 1935. She's working with the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus. And so as a result, during World War II, she becomes a riveter, Rosie the Riveter, the great character in World War II.

So Maria Rasputina becomes one of those female riveters who is working in the United States for the American war effort. In 1968, Maria Respoutina makes the bizarre claim that the First Lady of the United States, Pat Nixon, the wife of President Richard Nixon, came to her in a dream. Pat Nixon, whatever she thought about that, had nothing to say. She also endorsed a claim by a woman called Anna Anderson, who said that she was the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia.

Now, Anastasia is somebody who a lot of conspiracy theories have attached themselves to. She was the youngest daughter of Tsar Nicholas II and was in the room when the entire Russian royal family were assassinated by the Bolsheviks. But the story runs that Anastasia somehow managed to crawl her way out of their escape from Russia to the west. And various people claimed to be Anastasia, including Anna Anderson. In the end, Maria Rasputin never saw just... served. Felix Yusupov lived comfortably in Paris, Grand Duke Dmitri in Switzerland, while her father's name became legend. Towards the end of a life, she did seem to come around to the idea that possibly Yusuf and Rasputin had been in a relationship that had inexplicably

soured. And although Maria didn't see justice, perhaps her fight succeeded in another way, For more than a century later, the murder of Rasputin still fascinates us. Not as a crime solved, but as a mystery unsolved. A story of politics, passion, and myth that ensured the mad monk of Siberia would never be forgotten. Rasputin's killers believed that by silencing him, they were saving Russia. Instead, they helped to hasten the collapse of the monarchy he had served. Within months, the Tsar was gone.

The dynasty destroyed, and a new world was rising from the ashes of the old. Yet Rasputon's shadow never left. His story has endured through rumor and legend of the monk who could not be killed. From Siberian obscurity to the courts of St. Petersburg, and finally to a frozen river on the edge of the city, Rasputon's journey remains one of history's most haunting tales. Thanks for exploring the past with us today. If you like this episode, please be sure to follow for more. We post new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

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