Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin - CONSPIRACY: The Mad Monk Who Controlled the Romanovs

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

In the final years of Imperial Russia, a mysterious peasant mystic named Grigori Rasputin rose to extraordinary influence over the royal Romanov family. Trusted by the Empress for his apparent ability to ease her son's illness, Rasputin became a figure of endless rumor, accused of everything from manipulation and debauchery to holding secret sway over the crumbling empire. His dramatic murder in 1916, said to have required poison, bullets, and drowning to finally kill him, only deepened the legends surrounding him. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson explores the strange life and death of Rasputin, the mystic who became a lightning rod for a dynasty in collapse, and the myths of occult control that continue to surround him more than a century later.For more, follow Conspiracy Theories, Cults, and Crimes wherever you listen to podcasts: https://pod.link/1828469754If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Scams, Money, & Murder to never miss a case! To hear episodes ad-free, subscribe to Crime House+. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Scams, Money, & Murder is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Crime House 24/7, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Murder True Crime Stories, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hi everyone, it's Vanessa Richardson. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another crime house show, Murder True Crime Stories. Join Carter Roy every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, as he explores history's most notorious murders like you've never heard before. Follow Murder True Crime Stories, available wherever you listen to podcasts. This is Crime House. Late on the night of December 16th, 1916, in a candlelit cellar, beneath a candlelit cellar beneath a palace in the Russian capital, a prince sat and watched a peasant eat cake. The prince was Felix Yusupov, one of the richest men in the world. The peasant was a Siberian man named Grigory

Rasputin, and the little cakes on the plate in front of him were packed with cyanide. Yusupov had been told the dose could kill several grown men in minutes, but Rasputin just kept eating. He asked for wine and Yusupov poured him glass after glass, each one laced with the same poison. Rasputin drank them down, complained that his throat was scratchy, and asked the prince to sing him a song. Hours went by, and the peasant was still alive. So eventually, Yusupov grabbed a revolver and shot Rasputin in the chest. The man crashed to the floor. Finally, it looked like it was over. Then Rasputin opened his eyes. According to Yusupov, the dead man jumped up, foaming at the mouth, and lunged for his throat.

Yusupov tore himself loose and ran. Rasputin followed him out into the snow on all fours roaring his name. Out in the freezing courtyard, Yusupov's co-conspirators fired again and again until finally Rasputin dropped to the ground. They wrapped his body in cloth, brought it to the river, and shoved it in through a hole in the ice. Days later, they pulled him out to find that his lungs were full of water, which meant that after the poison, after the bullets, after everything, the thing that killed the mad monk of Russia was drowning. That's the story people have been telling for more than a hundred years.

The problem is, it might not even be true, which leaves me wondering, was Rasputin a holy man, a con artist, a sorcerer who had power over life and death, or was he something a lot more ordinary, a scapegoat for an empire that was grumbling? From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories, they're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is conspiracy theories. cults and crimes, a crimehouse original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I'll explore the real people

at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And remember, these Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for Crime House Studios, and be sure to like and subscribe. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, please leave you. a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus and

get every episode of this show and the rest of the crimehouse lineup, ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go tocrimehouseplus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Conspiracy Theory's Cults and Crimes show page. Today, I'm David. into one of the strangest figures in modern history, Gregori Rasputin. And I'm going to do my best with the pronunciations, but I'm no expert, so if I get anything wrong,

please let me know, I do read the comments. Rasputin was a poor peasant from the far side of Siberia, who somehow ended up whispering in the ear of the most powerful family in Russia. To the empress, he was a saint sent by God to save her dying son. To almost everyone else, he was a fraud, a sex maniac, a sorcerer, and a traitor who was steering the country off a cliff. For a century, he's been the face of everything that went wrong in the final days of Imperial Russia.

But the deeper you dig, the more you realize that the famous version of Rasputin, the mad monk with the hypnotic eyes, was built piece by piece by the people who wanted him gone. So who was he really? And who needed him to be a monster? All that and more coming up. By the early 1900s, the Russian Empire stretched from Europe all the way to the Pacific. It was one of the largest territories the world had ever seen, and it was ruled by one man, Tsar Nicholas II. In theory, his word was absolute, but in practice, Nicholas was presiding over a country that

was starting to come apart. Most of his people were poor peasants with almost nothing, while a tiny circle of no held nearly everything. Cities were filling up with angry factory workers. Revolutionaries were passing around pamphlets and bombs. And at the top of that unstable world sat a royal court that had developed a strange obsession. In those final years, the Russian aristocracy was fascinated with the occult, seances, fortune tellers, faith healers, mystics of every kind. Wealthy-educated people would gather in beautiful drawing rooms to contact the dead and search for hidden spiritual truths. That was the world Gregori Rasputin was about to walk into. Rasputin was born around

1869 in a village called Pachrovskaya, way out in western Siberia, along a river, surrounded by forest and mud. His family were peasants, a little better off than some of their neighbors, but still a world away from the marble and gold of the capital. As a young man, Grigory had a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker. He drank, he got into fights, he married a local woman named Proscovia, started having children and worked the land like everyone else around him. Then in his late 20s, something changed. Rasputin left home and went on a religious pilgrimage to a monastery. No one can say for sure what happened to him there, but the man who came back was not the man who left. He gave up meat. He gave up alcohol. He prayed for hours, sang hymns, and talked about God

with an intensity that unsettled the people who'd known him his whole life. Rasputin had become what Russians called Astronic, a holy wanderer. These were men who walked from village to village, from shrine to shrine, living off the kindness of strangers, and offering prayers and blessings in return. They weren't priests. They held no official rank in the church, they were something older and stranger than that. A kind of freelance holy man, and ordinary Russians often treated them with enormous respect. As Rasputin wandered, people started to notice.

He had a gift. When he prayed with someone, they felt something. When he spoke, he seemed to look right into their souls and know exactly what was wrong. And then there were the eyes. Nearly everyone who met Rasputin came away talking about his eyes. They were pale, piercing, and so intense that people said they felt pinned in place, unable to look away. Word spread quickly, and Rasputin picked up followers.

At first it was mostly local peasants who would gather to pray with him, but as his following grew, so did the whispers. Back in his home village, people started saying his prayer meetings weren't as holy as they looked. There were rumors that women were involved, and that behind closed doors there was singing and swaying. late into the night. But there was one particular piece of gossip that would follow Rasputin for the rest of his life, that he'd gotten mixed up with a secret sect called the Clisti. The Clistie were a banned underground religious group with a shocking reputation. According to the stories, they held ecstatic rituals in the dark, spinning and dancing themselves into a frenzy

to get closer to God. Those rituals were said to end in wild sexual free-for-alls. It was exactly the kind of thing that could get a holy man branded as a heretic or worse. Rasputin denied it, but the accusation stuck, and it traveled with him when he left Siberia behind, because by around 1904, Rasputin had set his sights on the capital, St. Petersburg. And the timing couldn't have been better. When Rasputin arrived in St. Petersburg, he found a city full of rich, bored, spiritually hungry aristocrats who were desperate to believe in something. A real live holy man from the wilds of Siberia with burning eyes and a direct line to God

was exactly what they were looking for. Rasputin didn't change when he walked into these gilded drawing rooms. He was a rough peasant in a coarse belted shirt and heavy boots with a thick untrimmed beard and dirt under his fingernails. He ate with his hands, reaching into the dishes and passing food to elegant ladies with his greasy. To the perfumed nobles around him, that was the whole appeal. Here was an authentic man of the soil, unpolished and unafraid, who seemed to carry God around with him in a way none of their tame court priests ever had.

He got passed from drawing room to drawing room, dazzling the people he met, and his biggest break came through two sisters. Princesses, Militza and Anastasia, were originally from the small kingdom of Montenegro, and had married into the Russian aristocracy. The sisters were so deep into mysticism and the occult that people at Court nicknamed them the black princesses. They collected holy men the way other nobles collected art, and they had the ear of the most important woman in the empire, the Tsar's wife, Empress Alexandra. A few years before Rasputin turned up, the sisters had brought the Empress another holy man,

a French mystic named Nisier-on-Telm Philippe. Philippe ran seances. claimed he could see the future and told the royal couple he could even determine whether an unborn child would be a boy or a girl. He was eventually exposed as a fraud and pushed out of Russia around 1903.

But the court's appetite for mystics didn't end with Philippe, and the black princesses could give Rasputin something no one else could, a path straight to the empress. Alexandra was originally a German princess and a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria. She'd married Tsar Nicholas for love, which was actually unusual for a royal marriage,

and she was intensely religious, having thrown herself completely into the Russian Orthodox faith of her new country. She and Nicholas had four daughters in a row, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia. And in a monarchy that expected a male heir, the pressure for a son was enormous. Then in 1904, it finally happened. Alexander gave birth to a boy, Alexei, the long-awaited heir to the Russian throne. The whole empire celebrated, but almost immediately his parents realized something was terribly wrong. Baby Alexei wouldn't stop bleeding. A small cut, a little bruise, and the bleeding would go

on and on. It turned out Alexei had hemophilia, an inherited disorder that keeps the blood from clotting properly. It ran in Queen Victoria's family, and it had been passing. down through Alexandra's side to her son. A minor injury that would heal in any other child could turn into a slow, agonizing, life-threatening event for Alexei. The future of the entire dynasty rested on this one fragile little boy, so Nicholas and Alexandra made a decision that shaped everything that came next. They kept Alexei's illness a state secret. The Russian people were never told that their future Tsar could die from a fall, which meant that when Alexandra started to panic about her son, she couldn't turn to the nation for sympathy. She could only turn to God and to the holy men who

claimed to speak for him. Rasputin met the royal family for the first time in November of 1905. Nicholas even mentioned it in his diary, calling him a man of God from the Tobolsk region. But it was Alexandra that Rasputin needed to win over, and would finally be a man. finally bound her to him, came down to one thing, her son. The most famous example came in the fall of 1912. The family was staying at a hunting lodge called Spawa. After a jolting carriage ride, 8-year-old Alexei was having intense internal bleeding. A massive swelling formed in his groin and leg.

He was in constant pain and running a high fever. The doctors at his bedside had run out of options. People who were there believed the boy was dying. Priests were called. The family was preparing for the end. Desperate, Alexandra sent a telegram to Rasputin, who was back in Siberia at the time. His reply was calm and confident. He told her that God had seen her tears and heard her prayers. He said she shouldn't grieve and that her son would not die. And he added one more instruction. Don't let the doctors bother him too much. And then, Alexei got better. The swelling went down, the fever broke, the boy who everyone thought was about to die, slowly recovered.

To the doctors, it was a mystery. To Alexandra, it was proof of something she would believe with her whole heart for the rest of her life. This peasant could do what the finest physicians in the empire could not. God had sent Rasputin to save her son. From that point on, there was no separate. Rastputin from the royal family, Alexandra was convinced that as long as he was nearby, Alexei would live and the dynasty would survive. She called him our friend. She hung on his words. And that devotion turned a wandering Siberian peasant into the single most protected person

at the Russian court. It also made him the most hated. And before long, a lot of powerful people looked at this scruffy holy man standing next to the throne and decided he had to be destroyed. Something is happening in Dawson Creek. A wave of violence has swept over this community of just 13,000 people. It's like the kind of stuff you only hear about on TV. 15 murders in the last five years. Some criminals, I put them into the category of supervillains. I'm Timothy Sawa and from CVC's Uncover and the Fifth Estate, An investigation into deaths and disappearances in Dawson Creek, and what's behind it all. I'm not saying another word. Leave me alone.

The Mile Zero Murders. Available now on CBC Listen or wherever you get your podcasts. By around 1912, Gregori Rasputin had done the impossible. A poor peasant from Siberia had become a fixture inside the palace of the Tsar, trusted completely by the Empress because he seemed to be the only thing keeping her son alive. And all across St. Petersburg, the rest of the aristocracy watched this happen and asked the same furious question. Who does this man think he is? From the outside, the whole thing just looked wrong.

Russia had a rigid hierarchy, and Rasputin had skipped all of it. He held no title, no military command, no rank in the church. He was a rough-talking peasant who ate with his fingers, and now had the ear of the imperial family. To the nobles and the clergy who'd spent their whole lives climbing that ladder, it was an insult. And the stories that began swirling around him made it so much worse. The mildest rumors were about his drinking. People said he would down wine until he could barely stand.

But the crazier stuff had to do with his apparent womanizing. High society ladies came to his apartment to pray, seek his advice, and be near him. Many were the wives and daughters of powerful men. And according to the rumor mill, a lot of them were doing far more than praying. So how did a holy man explain what was going on in those rooms? Well, according to the gossip, Rasputin had built his own twisted version of religion. The idea went like this. You can't be forgiven for a sin you haven't committed,

so the surest path to holiness was to sin first and repent afterward. And the sin he supposedly recommended involved him personally. People said he taught his female followers that physical contact with his holy body would cleanse them of their sins and bring them closer to God. To his enemies, this was all the proof they needed. Rasputin was a fraud in a holy man's clothing, a sexual predator who had hypnotized half the women in the capital, and maybe even the empress herself. All over Russia, people began to murmur that Rasputin and Alexandra were lovers. It was an ugly, explosive accusation about the wife of the Tsar. There was no proof of it, but the Russian public didn't know that Rasputin's real role

was tending to a sick little boy because that little boy's illness was still a secret. So people filled in the blank with the worst thing they could imagine. The way they figured it, if a peasant had this much power over the empress, it had to be because he'd gotten her into bed. But the single most notorious story about Raspol's, Putin's wild behavior came out of Moscow in the spring of 1915. The way it was told, Rasputin went out for a night at a fancy restaurant called the Yar. He got roaring drunk.

He started bragging to everyone in earshot about his hold over the powerful, boasting that he could do whatever he wanted with the old girl, obviously a crude reference to the empress herself. And then he supposedly went completely over the edge, dropping his trousers, and waving himself around the restaurant, telling the room that this was the instrument he used to control Russia. The scene was so obscene that the police allegedly had to be called to haul him away. The story raced around the country to Russians who already despised him.

The incident at the Yarr was the final confirmation of everything they believed. Here was a drunk, degenerate peasant, openly bragging about his grip on the crown, humiliating the imperial family in front of a room full of strangers. It made Rasputin look wildly out of control, and it made the Tsar and Zarina look like fools for keeping him around. Whether every detail of that night was true almost didn't matter anymore. The legend of Rasputin had taken on a life of its own, and it was becoming impossible to kill. And I mean that in a literal sense, because someone had already tried to kill Rasputin for real and failed. It happened back in the summer of 1914, the year before that night at the Yard. Rasputin had gone home to his

village in Siberia. On a Sunday afternoon out in the street near his house, a woman approached him asking for money. Her name was Kionia Guseva, and part of her face was disfigured, her nose eaten away. As Rasputin reached out, she pulled a dagger from under her clothes and drove it into his stomach, ripping upward. She screamed that she had killed the Antichrist. Rasputin staggered, clutching his insides, and somehow stayed on his feet long enough for people to grab her. He was rushed into emergency surgery, and for days, it wasn't clear he would survive. It turned out, Guseva was a follower of one of Rasputin's bitter enemies, a former holy man named Iliador, who had turned on Rasputin and started denouncing him as the devil in human form.

Rasputin was convinced Iliadour had sent her. Whether or not that was true, the message was unmistakable. There were people in Russia who wanted this man dead, and they were willing to act on it. He did survive that attack, but the wound left him in pain, and it left him rattled. And it came at the worst possible moment, because just as Rasputin was recovering, Russia marched into a catastrophe that would give his enemies everything they needed. In the summer of 1914, World War I broke out, and Russia threw itself into the the fighting. The Russian army was huge, but it was poorly supplied and poorly led, and it suffered

staggering losses against the Germans. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. Back home, food ran short, and prices shot up. The mood in the country turned dark and bitter. Then in the summer of 1915, Tsar Nicholas made a fateful decision. With his armies collapsing, he decided to leave the capital and go take personal command of the troops at the front. On paper, it looked noble, the emperor standing shoulder to shoulder with his soldiers. In reality, it was a disaster in the making, because now every defeat belonged to him personally. Plus, with Nicholas away at the front, someone had to run things in the Capitol, and that someone was his wife. Empress Alexandra, a woman the public already

distrusted, who was about to lean harder than ever on the one advisor she trusted completely. What happened over the next year and a half turned the government into a revolving door. Alexandra, guided by Rasputin, went through ministers at a dizzying pace. Officials she and Rasputin didn't like were pushed out. New men, some of them loyal to Rasputin, some of them wildly unqualified, were shoved into important jobs running the country in the middle of of a world war. In the 17 months, Alexandra was effectively in charge, from the fall of 1915 to the start of 1917, Russia burned through four prime ministers, five ministers of the interior, three foreign ministers, and three ministers of war. Nobody stayed in a job long enough to learn it.

People had a name for the chaos, the ministerial leapfrog. To the public, it looked like the empire's government was being reshuffled on the whims of a mad Siberian peasant. And then came the accusation that turned Rasputin from an embarrassment into a suspected traitor. Alexandra had been born a German princess. Now Russia was locked in a brutal war against Germany, and here was the German-born empress running the government with a strange peasant at her side. It didn't take long for people to start connecting those dots into a sinister picture. Rumors spread that Alexandra and Rasputin were secretly working. for the enemy, that there was a pro-German cabal at the heart of the palace, plotting to pull Russia

out of the war and betray the country. Some went further still. They said Rasputin himself was a German agent, and that Russia was losing the war because he wanted it to. For a country drowning in dead soldiers and empty breadlines, it was the ultimate explanation. All that suffering had to be someone's fault, and a foreign-born empress and her sinister Mr. Holy Man made the perfect villains. By the end of 1916, that rage had found a focus. To a certain group of aristocrats, the conclusion was obvious. Rasputin was destroying Russia and disgracing the crown, and the Tsar and Zarina were too far under his spell to see it. If the royal family wouldn't get rid of them, then someone else would have to, for the good of the

country, for the good of the monarchy itself. The man who will be able to be able to be. The man who will appointed himself to lead that mission was Prince Felix Yusupov. Yusupov was young, handsome, theatrical, and super rich. He was aired one of the greatest fortunes in Russia and married to the Tsar's own niece, and he pulled in two powerful allies. One was Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, a cousin of the Tsar himself, which meant royal blood, was now part of the plot. The other was Vladimir Purishkevich, a fiery right-wing politician. Just weeks earlier in November of 1916, Porishkevich had stood up in the Russian parliament. He delivered a thundering speech denouncing the dark forces around the throne and the ministerial leapfrog he blamed on

Rasputin. It was a sensation, and Yusupov was paying close attention. Not long after, the two men started planning how to get rid of the holy man once and for all. The plan was was to lure Rasputin somewhere private, and Yusupov had the perfect bait. He would invite the holy man to his palace on the Moika Canal late at night, with the promise that he'd finally get to meet Yusupov's beautiful wife, Irina. Rasputin took the invitation. What happened next became one of the most famous murder stories in the world, and almost everything people know about it comes from the killers themselves, especially Yusupov, who would tell and retell the tale for the rest of his life. According to that account, the killing happened

on the night of December 16th and into the early morning hours of the 17th. So a quick note on that date because you'll see different numbers if you go looking it up. Russia was still using the old Julian calendar back then, running 13 days behind the West. So what Russians called December 16th is December 29th on the calendar the rest of the world uses. Either way, that was the night Yusupov brought Rasputin down into a cellar room he'd had especially decorated for the occasion. Then he fed him those cakes and wine loaded with cyanide, and as the story goes, the poison did nothing. Rasputin ate and drank and stayed impossibly alive, while the other attackers waited upstairs, their horror growing.

Yusupov finally lost his nerve, took a revolver, and shot Rasputin in the chest. The holy man went down, and the attackers were sure he was dead. But when Yusupov leaned over the body a while later, Rasputin's eyes flew open. He seized the prince by the throat. Later, Yusupov said that in that moment he was certain he was looking at something, not entirely human, a man who should have been dead twice over, refusing to die. He wrote that it seemed like Rasputin had been, quote,

raised from the dead by the powers of evil. Yusupov broke free and fled up the stairs. Rasputin hauled himself up after him, out into the snow-covered courtyard, and that's where Porishkiewicz opened fire, hitting him as he tried to escape. Rasputin finally collapsed. The attackers bound his body, drove it across the city, and dropped it through a hole in the ice of the frozen river. When his corpse was recovered a few days later, the legend reached its unbelievable climax. People said his lungs were full of water, which could only mean one thing. After the poison, after the shootings, after being dumped in a freezing river, Rasputin had still been alive down there under the ice. He hadn't died from any of the things his killers threw at him. The story ended with the freezing water, finishing with the poison and the bullets could not. It's a story that turned Rasputin

into something eternal. The holy devil who could not be killed by poison or bulls. or even a river. There's just one problem with it. Three days later, a doctor laid Rasputin's body out on an examination table and what he found tore that legend apart. What of everything you learned in history class was only half the story? I'm Dr. Hrini-Bot. I started as a clinical pharmacist and somewhere along the way I became obsessed with the mysteries that history never fully solved. That's exactly why I created hidden history. a Rewind Studios' original podcast powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, I go where history touches the unknown.

Vanished civilizations, doomsday prophecies, paranormal phenomena, and events that science still can't fully explain. I'll give you historical context. I'll break down the science. I'll even interrogate the supernatural. I treat these moments like open case files, not miss, not superstition, just incomplete explanations waiting for a closer look.

And I'll ask the question, what if this happened today? Listen to and follow Hidden History, available now wherever you get your podcasts. After Rasputin's body was pulled from the ice in December of 1916, a professor of forensic medicine named Dimitri Kassarotov performed the autopsy. Between his examination, photographs of the body, and later reviews by modern forensic experts, we have the closest thing there is to the truth of that night. And it tells a very different story than the one Yusupov spent his life selling. So let's start with the poison.

Kasarotov found no trace of it. There was no cyanide in Rasputin's system, and no sign of the damage a big dose of poison would have done to his stomach. In fact, the most likely explanation is the simplest one. The poison was never there. One of the people who plotted the attack was a doctor named Lazovirt, the man who was supposed to prepare the cyanide. years later, he admitted that at the last minute he couldn't go through with it and swapped in a harmless powder instead.

Rasputin survived the cakes and wine because there was probably nothing in them. Then there's the drowning, the eeriest part of the whole legend. But according to the autopsy, it didn't happen. There was no water in Rasputin's lungs. He was not breathing when he went into the water. He was already dead because what killed Grigory Rasputin was. a bullet. The autopsy found he'd been shot three times, and the last one was the one that mattered. A bullet fired into his forehead at point-blank range. That single wound would have

killed him instantly. So, if that's what happened, where did the wild version come from? The cakes, the wine, the body rising up off the floor. It came from the killers, and above all from Felix Usupov. Yusupov wrote memoirs about the murder, and he told the story again and again, over the decades, exaggerating it a little more each time, especially when he needed money or attention. He had every reason to make it as gothic and supernatural as possible. If Rasputin was just a man, then Yusupov and his friends had lured a guy to a basement and shot him. But if Rasputin was a demon in human form who shrugged off poison and rose from the dead, then killing him made Yusupov a hero who'd saved Russia.

from a monster. And there's a detail that gives the whole thing away. It comes from Rasputin's own daughter, Maria, who fled Russia and ended up performing in a circus in the West. She always insisted the story was nonsense, and she pointed out something her father's killers apparently didn't know. Rasputin didn't even like sweets. She said the idea that he'd happily sat there, gobbling down a plate of cakes, was

ridiculous. He never would have touched them. So if the moment. famous story about him was invented, how many of the others were, too. Take that infamous night at the Yar restaurant, the drunken strip teas that supposedly proved how far gone Rasputin was. For decades, it was treated as hard fact, repeated in book after book. But the historian Douglas Smith, who wrote what many consider the definitive biography of Rasputin, went digging in the Russian archives and found the actual police surveillance reports from that period. Rasputin was

was under near constant watch by the secret police, the Okrana, and their agents wrote down his movements in obsessive detail. According to those reports, the shocking version of the Yarr incident was manufactured. The lurid, trouser-dropping scandal was written up months after the fact, pushed by an official who was a political enemy of Rasputin's in an effort to turn the czar against him. The most famous proof of Rasputin's debauchery, the story everyone knew, largely an invention designed to bring him down. And this fits a pattern. Rasputin had enemies with real power and real motive to lie about him.

Rival clergymen who thought this unschooled peasant was making a mockery of the church, nobles who were disgusted that he'd leapfrog them to the throne, politicians who wanted to weaken the monarchy and others who wanted to save it from itself. All of them had reasons to make Rasputin sound as bad. is possible. And a lot of the most scandalous facts about him trace back to exactly these people. Even the basic label everyone knows him by, the mad monk, is wrong. Rasputin was never a monk. He never took holy orders. He never joined a monastery, never held any position in the Russian church at all. He was astronic, a self-taught, wandering holy man, which is a very different thing. The catchy,

sinister nickname was pinned on him later, and it stuck because it sounded good, not because it was accurate. The dark sexual sect, the Clistie, is murky too. The church did investigate whether Rasputin belonged to it, but it was never proven that he did. It stayed what it had always been, an accusation thrown around by people who wanted him discredited. None of this makes Rasputin a saint, he did drink, he almost certainly had affairs, he was ambitious, and he clearly enjoyed the access and influence he'd gained. But the towering cartoonish villain, the sex-crazed sorcerer who hypnotized an empire, was mostly a character that was created by his enemies, which brings us to the biggest question of all. If the man was so exaggerated, then how much of his

supposed power over Russia was real? The first and biggest theory is the one that's haunted this story for a century, that Rasputin was the true power behind the throne, a sinister mystic who'd hypnotized the royal family and was secretly steering the entire Russian Empire, maybe even on behalf of Germany. And there are real facts underneath it. Rasputin's influence wasn't imaginary.

Alexandra did trust him completely. She did consult him on government-apporting. appointments. During the war, while Nicholas was away, ministers were hired and fired at a startling pace, and Rasputin did have a hand in some of it. For people watching the country fall apart, it looked like proof that a scheming peasant was running Russia into the ground. But when historians dig into it, the puppet master image starts to shrink. There's no solid evidence that Rasputin and Alexandra were secretly working for Germany, or that either of them was plotting to betray the country. After calming the archives, historian Douglas Smith found nothing to support the idea that they were

tools of the enemy. Rasputin's political meddling was real, but it was also chaotic and inconsistent. It was the work of a man dabbling in things he didn't fully understand, not a mastermind executing a grand plan. Some historians go even further. Dominic Levin, one of the leading scholars of this period, argues that Rasputin had way less political power than the legend suggests. His supposed grip on the government was mostly society gossip and his own drunken bragging about how much he could do. And there's one fact that cuts hard against the whole idea of Rasputin secretly pulling the strings. Rasputin was against the war from the start. He'd warned Nicholas that fighting Germany would be a disaster. Nicholas did it anyway. And a man

supposedly running the empire doesn't get overruled on the biggest decision of the century. So the truth seems to be that Rasputin's power was smaller and messier than the legend. He was influential, yes, but he was also a convenient scapegoat, a single strange figure that a frightened country could point to and blame for a catastrophe that had a thousand causes. The second theory is stranger, and it's gained real traction in recent years. It says that the men in that palace on the Moika weren't the only ones who wanted Rasputin dead, that a foreign government helped pull the trigger, specifically Great Britain.

The logic goes like this. In 1916, Britain and Russia were wartime allies against Germany, but in London, politicians were worried that Russia might quit the war and make a separate peace. That would free up huge numbers of German troops to turn west and hammer the British and French. And the person many suspected of pushing for exactly that kind of peace was Rasput. Was Rasput? So the theory goes that British intelligence decided the holy man was a threat to the entire war effort and arranged to have him eliminated. The evidence people point to is intriguing. There was a British intelligence officer named Oswald Rayner, who happened to be close friends with Felix Usupov. The two had known each other since their student days at Oxford.

Rainer was in the Russian capital at the time of the murder, and there's reason to believe he was at or not. near the Yusupov Palace that night. Supporters of the theory, including the team behind a well-known BBC documentary, focus on the fatal shot to Rasputin's forehead. They argue it may have come from a British-style revolver, fired by a professional like Rainer, rather than by one of the amateur attackers. There's even a surviving letter between British officers afterward that seems to congratulate them on a job well done

with a reference to dark forces being dealt with. It's a great story, but it's far from proven. The case against British involvement is simple. When a historian named Keith Jeffrey was given rare, full access to the secret archives of British intelligence to write their official story, he went looking for any sign of a plot to kill Rasputin. And he found nothing. No document, no order, no record linking any British agent to the murder. If Britain's spy service had orchestrated the assassination of a major figure inside an allied country,

you might expect some trace of it in their own files. There isn't one. So the British theory rests on coincidence, circumstance, and a handful of tantalizing hints, compelling, but a long way from proof, which leaves one more piece of the legend, and it is the eeriest of all. Before he died, Rasputin allegedly made it. made a prophecy. According to the story, he wrote a letter warning the royal family about his own death. If he was killed by ordinary Russians, by peasants or common criminals, then the Tsar had

nothing to fear, and his family would rule for centuries. But if he was murdered by nobles, by members of the Tsar's own circle, then everything would fall. The imperial family would all be dead within two years. Russia would tear itself apart. Now, the authenticity of that letter is very much in doubt. It surfaced through people close to Rasputin, and there's no way to be sure he wrote it, or wrote it before the fact. It's the kind of prophecy that gets a lot more impressive after the events it supposedly predicts. But you can understand why it sends a chill down people's spines, because Rasputin was murdered by nobles, and what happened next followed that dark prediction almost exactly.

Rasputin was killed in December of 1916. Two months later, revolution swept through the Russian capital. Bread shortages and anger over the endless war erupted. Soldiers refused to fire on the crowds, and the whole system buckled. Within weeks, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, and three centuries of Romanov rule ended almost overnight. The monarchy never recovered. The fate of the Romanovs after that is a lot of the Romanov's after that is a very long.

one of the most haunting stories of the 20th century. Nicholas, Alexandra, and all five of their children were taken prisoner, including that sick little boy, Alexei, whose illness had pulled Rasputin into their lives to begin with. In July of 1918, they were led into the cellar of a house in the town of Yakaterinborg and shot. The bodies were hidden. For decades, their exact fate was the subject of rumor and mystery, including a long-running legend. that one of the daughters, Anastasia, had somehow escaped. It wasn't until many years later that remains were found and identified, confirming what had happened to nearly all of them.

But Rasputin's prophecy, real or invented, had come true. The nobles shed his blood, and the family was gone within two years. As for Rasputin himself, his enemies made sure there wasn't much left to argue over. He was originally buried near one of the royal residences. on ground connected to the family that had loved him. But after the Tsar abdicated and the old order came crashing down, a group of soldiers dug his body back up. They hauled it out to the woods, built a fire,

and burned it until there was almost nothing left. The man at the center of 100 conspiracy theories was reduced to ash and scattered. So where does that leave us? For me, the least dramatic answer is probably the, the true one. The occult puppet master who secretly ran Russia was a myth. His debauchery was real, but wildly exaggerated, and in its most famous example, flat out invented, the demon who couldn't be killed was a story his murderer told to feel like a hero, and for all its intrigue, the British

assassination plot has never been proven. So zoom out, and you're left with a flawed, ambitious peasant who comforted a dying child and a desperate mother. He just happened to be standing next to the throne at the moment the whole empire came apart. And when an empire that big collapses, it needs someone to blame. Rasputin was the one they chose. But I want to know what you think. Do you believe Rasputin was a dangerous man who helped bring down the Romanovs? A threat that a foreign government decided to eliminate, or a flawed man who got turned into a monster by the people who wanted him gone. And that prophecy letter, was it a real warning or a lucky forgery? Head to the comments wherever you're listening and let me know I'd love to hear your thoughts. What stays with me about this story

sits at the very center of it. So strip away the sorcery and the scandal and you're left with a gravely ill little boy and two parents so frightened of losing him they'd believe anything and and anyone who promised he'd live. That's the human thing the legend buries. Alexei didn't choose to be born with a disease that could kill him from a bruise. Alexandra didn't choose to give it to him. They were people caught in something bigger than themselves and reaching for the one hand that seemed to offer help. And the version of Rasputin that came down to us, the mad monk, the sex-crazed sorcerer, the demon who wouldn't die, wasn't written by history. It was written,

by his enemies, by the man who killed him, and by a whole country that needed a single face to pin its downfall on. More than a century later, we're still repeating their version, and the one person who could tell us his own was burned in the woods and scattered to the wind. Now let's dive into the rabbit hole. Almost everything about the Rasputin legend falls apart when you look closely. The poison that was never there, the drowning that never actually happened, the unkillable body, the sex-crazed sorcerer, the peasant, secretly running an empire. It was all invented, exaggerated, or flat out disproven. But there's one piece that never quite dissolves, and it might be the strangest part of the whole story. He did seem to genuinely help Alexei. Over and over for years,

the same thing happened. Alexei would start bleeding, the doctors would run out of options and the family would brace for the worst. And then Rasputin would show up or send word, and the bleeding would stop. There are down-to-earth explanations for a lot of it. A frightened child bleeds worse than a calm one, and Rasputin had a real gift for calming people. Some historians think he leaned on something like hypnotic suggestion. And there's a more concrete theory that gets repeated a lot, that the doctors were dosing Alexei with aspirin, which thins the blood, and that Rasputin, who distrusted doctors, told them to back off. That meant he was taking away the very thing that was making the bleeding worse, without ever

knowing that's what he'd done. That last one is clever, because it even explains the most famous case of all. In the fall of 1912, at the hunting lodge called Spawa, Alexei was closer to death than he'd ever been. And this time, Rasputin wasn't in the room. He wasn't even in the country. He was home in Siberia more than a thousand miles away. Alexandra sent a telegram. Rasputin wired back that the boy would not die and that the doctors shouldn't be allowed to bother him too much. Within a day, the bleeding started to slow. Alexei lived. If the aspirin theory is right, that telegram may have worked by accident. Keep the doctors away would have meant stop the drug that's hurting him. It's a beautiful explanation.

There's just one catch. No one has ever proven that the doctors were giving Alexei aspirin in the first place. It fits, it makes sense, and it turns a miracle into medicine, but it's a theory built on an assumption, not a record. And hemophilia is cruel and unpredictable on its own. Sometimes those bleeds simply stop, for reasons doctors still can't fully explain. So strip it all away, and this is what's left.

a peasant with no medical training who again and again seemed to pull a dying child back from the edge, including once from the other end of the empire by telegram. Every single instance has a reasonable explanation. None of them can be proven. I don't think Rasputin was a sorcerer, but this is the part of the story I can't quite close the book on. If you can, I really want to hear it. Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is, conspiracy theories, cults and crimes. Come back next time, we'll hear another story about the real people at the center of the world's most notorious cults, conspiracies, and criminal acts. Conspiracy theories, cults and crimes is a Crimehouse original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crimehouse, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media at Crimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Conspiracy Theory cults and crimes wherever you get your podcasts.

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