The Rest Is History - 128. Rasputin

Episode Date: December 6, 2021

The peasant who became one of the most influential figures in the final days of the Russian Empire is an unbelievable story. But how much of the gossip, rumour and scandal that surrounded Grigori Rasputin is true? Dominic and Tom discuss, and somehow manage not to get too sidetracked by Boney M. To sign up to the brand new Rest Is History Club, go restishistorypod.com or click here. Benefits for members include an extra episode every week, a live streamed show every month, ad-free listening, and access to a Rest Is History chatroom where we'll be discussing episodes and suggesting subjects for future shows. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to war, a Siberian peasant called Grigory Rasputin wrote to Nicholas II, the Tsar of all the Russians. I know they all want war from you, Rasputin wrote, evidently not realising that this means ruin. Hard is God's punishment when he takes away reason. It's the beginning of the end. You are the Tsar, father of the people. Don't allow the madmen to triumph and destroy themselves and the people. Yes, they'll conquer Germany, but what of Russia? If one thinks then truly never for all

of time has one suffered like russia drowned in her own blood great will be the ruin grief without end grigory and dominic um i mean that is an amazing letter is it not i mean it is kind of properly prophetic it is very prescient it survived it's one of the it's extraordinary that it survived nicholas must have kept it with him after he went into captivity, which is extraordinary. But the fact that it's being sent by a peasant to the autocrat of all the Russias, this guy who thinks he's basically,

who's the last sort of absolute monarch in Europe, ordained by God, and he's getting advice from this sort of bedraggled, yeah, from this peasant, this relatively uneducated. And this peasant is at the heart of great events. So the descent of Europe into war, Russia's role in it, in the long run, the Russian revolution. So today's episode is focused on Rasputin, a figure of enormous kind of historical fascination. And we've had a lot of questions, a lot of questions about him.

And I would say the overwhelming tenor of those questions. Well, I'll read one from Benjamin Bitton, who I'll quote. Is it true that when his drinking and lusting and his hunger for power became known to more and more people, the demands to do something about this outrageous man became louder and louder. The words there, of course, not only from Benjamin Bitton, but from Boney M., whose Rasputin has been name-checked so many times. Most people will know him through Boney M., won't they? More than through history books or anything like that.

So was he the lover of the Russian queen? Before we get onto that, Tom, I have an exciting announcement for our listeners. Do you? Well, we've been going for more than a year, just over a year, I think. And we've been thrilled, haven't we, by the reaction from people listening to the podcast. So thrilled, in fact, that we've decided to set up our own community, our own club, the Rest Is History Club. Do you want to tell people about that?

You can listen to every episode, including the archive, without ads. I know, because the ads don't, some people don't care for some of your ads, I think it's fair to say. I think you've worn in particular. I don't want to put off that mental health charity from investing again in that show.

You're going on about Tiny Tom. I mean, that joke was funny the first hundred times. But if you want to get rid of that, you can sign up to this and you'll get every episode ad free. You will also get an extra episode every week. The content of which will be led by you, the listeners. So we will, you know, if you've got views on the episodes that you've heard, if you want to carry on the conversation, let us know and we will kind of go over that.

That's right. And if you sign up now, you will find the first of these episodes is up right now and there'll be a preview out tomorrow. On the main feed. So even if you don't sign up, you'll get a preview of that bonus episode. And Dominic, what is that episode on?

Aptly, it's on history's greatest clubs. So the Kit Kat Club, the Hellfire Club, a gentleman's club that I believe a member of the Rest is History team is a member of. And now the Rest is History Club. And the Rest is History Club. So that's great. And also we will be doing a live streamed episode once every month. For club members. Yeah. And the first one will be next week. So Wednesday, the 15th of December.

And we'll be doing that on the 60s, the 1960s. So you can watch and you can contribute to the episode. You can send an abuse while we're recording it. Yeah. Kind of laugh at Dominic while you're doing it. And also there is apparently there is a chat room community called discord which just seems absolutely absolutely perfect um so you can join that and we will be discussing episodes taking suggestions um and giving reading lists won't we yeah it says here sharing historical memes we're not going to be doing that no we're

not going to because i'm not i'm over 50 it's far too yeah if you start posting gifs or whatever i should be very disappointed in you i occasionally post a gif but i'm not a meme um right so uh so that's part of it as well uh and there are other benefits as well and how do you get how do you sign up to this incredible offer uh when you go to restishistorypod.com, restishistorypod.com, or you can click on the link in the show notes. So it's really simple, actually. It's very simple. It lives in whatever podcast app you normally use, it says here.

I love hearing you say that. And it takes you 30 seconds to sign up. Not even 30 seconds, actually, because I've done it. And it took about five seconds. So I'm afraid you do actually have to pay for this but it's absolute bargain isn't it dominic it's a bargain a bargain six pounds a month so that's maybe less than two pounds a week um now the important thing to say is that if you don't care for you're not you're unclubbable uh and you don't want to join and

you want to carry on listening for free then you just carry on listening as normal nothing has changed you're just missing out on the live stream the bonus episode the chance to see tom holland's memes all that but um although the positive is that you'll hear my adverts for mental health that's sweet and roundabout yeah it is ups and downs it's win-win you win some yeah yeah you do right okay so that's enough um that's enough uh self-promotion yes so that that that basically the bony m lover of the russian queen yeah that's his reputation it's all it's all well we'll unpack all this we'll unpack all this so should we start by talking about who rasputin is um so he's born in 1869 he's Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin, and he comes from a place called Pokrovskoe,

just over the Urals in Siberia, an absolute kind of flea-bitten, kind of down-at-heel kind of village in the middle of nowhere. But free, isn't it? So Siberia is free. Once you go across the Urals, you're no longer a serf. Exactly. So people have gone there.

His family, I think, go in the 17th century, is it? Yes, 1643 they settled. Good knowledge. So the year after the outbreak of the Civil War. That's how I remembered it. So they've been there all this time and they've done nothing. They've left no mark in history. They have this odd name.

So what English sort of speakers won't get is that rasputin then the surname it's a bit like being called mr rascal or something isn't it because our rasputnik is a sort of ne'er-do-well or there's something to do with the crossroads that i don't fully understand but basically the um the the name is is sort of a loaded name you know it's clearly a kind of a name from the lower orders and a sort of scruffy ne'er-do-wells kind of name but isn't that i mean i've often read this about the about the settlement of siberia that it's kind of like russia's world west i suppose it's yes i think exactly that's exactly and so the the kind of the hint of the frontiersman absolutely and it's also it's not but it's got something a bit more

than the american frontier i think because there is this hint of well something that dogs disputing throughout his life is this stuff about religious sectarianism and heresy so there's this sense if you're in st petersburg particularly or moscow i suppose that out there and the siberian frontier are all kinds of weird sects and they're worshipping devils and all this sort of stuff but also the converse of that that somehow you are close to god out there yeah so if rasputin's name has the kind of the slight hint of of the sinister about it his first name gregory he's named after gregory of nysa who is one of the great saints of fourth century Byzantium. He's actually, I mean, interesting in the context of serfdom, he's the church father who first argues that slavery as an institution is unacceptable to God. And so you do, it's this

kind of strange mix of the kind of the rascally, the kind of frontiersman with the very holy. And the question of whether Rasputin is a genuine holy man or whether he's a kind of sinister fraud, of course, is the great question that comes to royal Russia and continues to kind of complex historians to this day. But the funny thing about him is that we know so little, isn't it? So that there are lots of things written about his early life. So, for example, there's a claim about him as a young man that he was a horse thief and that the other villagers were cross with him being a horse thief and they threw him down on the ground. Did you see this?

They threw him down on the ground so violently that he fell on his genitals and from that point on would suffer from terrible pre-epism. So he had a permanent erection. This is totally untrue. Completely untrue. Appears to be utterly untrue. In fact, we know nothing at all about... Sorry, go on. What about his penis?

No, we'll come to that later because that will play quite significant. But we do know about his penis, don't we? Yeah, we know that there's nothing very interesting about it. Well, apparently it was quite dark. It was quite dark brown. Yes, I heard. But it wasn't particularly long quite dark it was quite dark brown yes i heard but it wasn't particularly long is it dark brown or i thought the guy was saying the rest of him was dark brown but his member wasn't anyway maybe well anyway it's it's it's the pigmentation is neither here nor there

but it's not particularly long and it's not permanently erect no so he he's there in this village he's a peasant he marries a peasant woman called pras govia and they have they have three children so he's got an absolutely standard life and then he clearly has in 1897 or so when he's just late 20s coming up to 30 he has some sort of breakdown doesn't he well it i mean for on this i guess on the kind of the measure of the russian peasantry it's a midlife crisis. Yeah, it is. It absolutely is.

He just thinks, God, this is awful. I'm going to go on a pilgrimage. So he wants to become, there are these people called the Straniki. So he wants to be a Stranik, which means he's going to go off and he's going to commune with nature and with God. And he will wander about the countryside. Wearing chains, right? Yes. He wears fetters at first.

So this is very kind of, you know, it's very kind of Byzantine behaviour, isn't it? You can imagine somebody doing this in Syria. Kind of holy fool. Exactly, exactly. This is what he does. And he pitches up at a place called Verkatoria in the Urals, which is a monastery.

And this is a place where there's lots of elders and stuff. And anybody who's dostoevsky will know the import the importance the sort of holy men and elders and monks and people of this kind i mean they're all different kind of versions karamazov and all that i mean i have to say that um the reading about rasputin who i didn't know a huge amount about i mean just really bonnie m was basically the limit of my knowledge but i do love um dostoevsky and throughout reading about him the echoes of dostoevsky's novels absolutely keep kind of coming um and i guess that you know a lot of the themes that dostoevsky is tackling are obviously part of of of this kind of the the tensions and the social conflicts, religious

conflicts, the stresses in Russian life, that part of the reason, obviously, I guess, why Rasputin has this cut through is that he just embodies all these tensions. He does, doesn't he? So it's about sort of the clash between the urban modernity of St. Petersburg

and this kind of vanishing world of kind of a mystical, rural, peasant Russia. That's all there in Rasputin's story, isn't it? And it's all there in, you know, it's there in Dostoevsky's work in the picture of St. Petersburg in Crime and Punishment. Once you've read that, it's quite hard to rid yourself of that when you're reading about Rasputin when he finally goes to the imperial capital. So anyway, he decides he what he's

had this pilgrimage there's no reason to doubt that this is sincere I mean because what's in it for him he's he's left his village he's gone on the pilgrimage he comes back he decides he wants to be kind of a holy man well okay so I think I mean I think there's some there's a question here from uh thoughtfully catholic yeah did rasputin propose anything theologically unorthodox or was he simply one of the many charismatic figures within the national the normal framework of orthodoxy so essentially was he you know was he a heretic no i don't think he was or was he a conventional you know was he conventionally religious well i mean you and i both read this

book by douglas smith this amazing biography incredibly detailed biography of rasputin and rasputin's life and times and running through this book is the is the suspicion that people had particularly in sort of his rivals within the orthodox kind of world but also kind of aristocrats and officials and stuff in st petersburg that he was a sectarian. And they were particularly anxious and worried that he was what's called a clist. So these are kind of flagellants. And these are seen as absolutely beyond the pale. There's about 100,000 of them in Russia at the end of the 19th century. And there's all this talk, he must be a heretic.

He must be, you know, a sectarian. He's whipping himself. But this seems to be completely untrue. That actually, theologically, he's whipping himself but this seems to be completely untrue that actually theologically he's pretty standard that the the clisty are um supposed to to dance and then to end up having kind of vast orgies yes and there's that subsection of them that you talked about in our program on eunuchs the scopsy that they hack off their testicles or their breasts or whatever um and again you get this kind of this obsessional interest where kind of extreme radical desire for god asceticism kind of blurs and blends into kind of basically a genital obsession yes that's you yeah well that's

why this is why i find this subject so interesting. Yeah. But anyway, I don't think this is right with Rasputin. I think Rasputin, because in Douglas Smith's, I mean, it's an amazing biography. And in his biography, he has lots of stuff from Rasputin's letters and what people heard him say and so on. And it's all kind of quite, it's all a little bit primary school head teacher. You know, God is love. Be in touch with the natural world be kind yeah yeah you know it's absolutely nothing outlandish or or that anyone it's actually quite bland do you not think kind of thought for the day it is very thought for the day respite would be an absolute

regular anyway good that that path was not open to him he officially gets investigated doesn't he he does was multiple investigations. And he gets a kind of clean bit of help. And I thought that one of the really interesting comments on him was made in 1918, so after he died and after the Russian Revolution, when no one had any interest in sticking up for him. And somebody passes through his village and they ask about him. And the overwhelming consensus is that he was a kind-hearted person

and that he was a kind-hearted person and that he was a man of god uh and that i i mean that seems to i think the evidence that he was essentially an orthodox figure seems pretty clear yeah i think i think that's that's that's pretty right but anyway no one would care about him if he hadn't made this journey so he goes to kazan which is this kind of tatar city and he's a bit of a... So this is... We should paint the context, shouldn't we? Because Russia is in a very bad place when he's on his sort of travels

in the late 1890s and early 1900s. It's very repressive, very divided, in some ways incredibly backward. So, you know, serfdom is within living memory. A lot of people in the countryside living in intense poverty but at the same time it is industrializing and urbanizing at a at a kind of breakneck a kind of chinese rate which causes all kinds of problems of its own the political system hasn't caught up at all kind of buckling and straining under absolutely yeah and all the

elite are they like a lot of their counterparts elsewhere in europe they have become obsessed but in this incredibly sort of neurotic morbid way with the occult with seances with hypnotism everybody believes in what they call dark forces so it's just a absolute standard belief among the sort of russian elite that there are there are conspiracies often with the jews yeah Jews or the Freemasons playing key roles that are responsible for all the ills of Russia. And because of that fascination, it means that when Rasputin, he merely has to arrive in a place, it seems, and kind of aristocrats and bigwigs will take him up and be interested in him and sort of show him off as a bit of a

grotesque yeah in their salons and stuff but i think also i mean one of the things that that um i picked up from my admittedly cursory reading of the kind of the climate into which rasputin enters is that actually the hint of the the kind of the sinister the the demonic, intermixed with the saintly, is actually incredibly appealing to people. Yes. That that's kind of a selling point. So there's this terrifyingly, kind of clearly charismatic

and basically diabolic figure, Alexei, is it Shdetetinin? I hope my pronunciation there is right. Beautifully, beautiful Russian. Yeah, who is a clist, I think. Yeah. And he arrives in St. Petersburg in in 1906 which is basically around the same time as as rasputin is turning up and he is i mean he is basically a kind of a drunk a rogue um he encourages his followers to give them give him all their money to give their wives. Yes. And it's an awful, awful thing that he wants his followers to do,

which is to give their children over to him, and he will then put them in orphanages. That's right. So that they will never be able to find them, even if they then repent it. It's just awful. And then he gets put in prison for for raping a uh underage girl uh rather like um stavrogin does in dostoevsky's um uh the devils yeah i mean it's all kind of incredibly reminiscent of that uh and and

women who go to see him in prison because he you know they kind of remain obsessed by him they write about him as being both god and satan at the same time and this is all the kind of stuff that will then be said about Rasputin. But I think that Rasputin is not of that order really at all. His behavior is a bit dubious. We'll come to his behavior, I think. I think you're right that Rasputin is not. There's no reason at this point to believe that he's a fraud or a charlatan

or motivated purely by self-interest or by greed or anything like that. He's just found his calling and and his and his his path leads him to st petersburg now when he gets to st petersburg he's taken up by or he comes to the attention of these two montenegrin sisters aren't they called the black the black women or the black crows they have very let's call them the black crows yeah that's never a very appealing never a very appealing label i think so the black crows they have very let's call them the black crows yeah that's never a very appealing never a very appealing label i think so the black crows are connected with the the royal family they've married into the imperial family i think haven't they and they and through them i

think he gets to meet nicholas and alexandra isn't that also there is um there's's a very high-ranking official kind of bishop, archbishop in the Orthodox Church, Theophan. Oh, yes. Who's a big fan. Theophan, yeah. There's also another bishop, isn't there, called Germagen, who castrated himself. So, you know, this is basically the milieu in which Rasputin is moving,

a very sort of strange and feverish kind of world. So Nicholas and Alexandra, I mean, we should talk about them a bit, shouldn't we? So Nicholas, born in 1868, Alex, as she's called. So she's Queen Victoria's granddaughter, I think, isn't she? And she's terribly serious and earnest, and she's German. German, yeah. And everybody hates her, basically,

because she has that thing that people sometimes have. She's very shy and anxious. And so everyone thinks she's being haughty. And she just never, ever adapts and clearly never really understands Russia. And they don't understand her. And basically, she and Nicholas become increasingly isolated. All the other people in the elite despise them. Yeah.

And they're politically utterly useless and inept and and also um alexandra carries haemophilia she does well she has already so she's had four daughters um olga tatiana maria and anastasia and she's desperate for a boy very sort of henry the eighth style it's a thing going on at the court she's desperate for a boy. Very sort of Henry VIII style thing going on at the court. She's desperate for a boy. And so she's already had one kind of crank, hasn't she? This guy called Monsieur Philippe, who's a... He's a cultist. He's a butcher's apprentice from Lyon.

He's a hypnotist and stuff, isn't he? And he pitches up at the court and they hang around with him. Eventually, everyone persuades them to kick him out. But it just shows that Alex... is very susceptible they're both incredibly susceptible um but even specifically isn't it the the haemophilia of their son when he gets born well yeah so they've had four daughters yes and then alexa is born in 1904 so he's the heir and he's he exactly they realize pretty much straight away that he's hemophiliac and the base of the life expectancy is about 13 so if you're if you're if you're

neurotic if you're isolated if you're desperate for a male heir this is a terrible emotional position to be in i mean she's so vulnerable to yeah yeah and what's then worse is that exactly as Rasputin arrives in St. Petersburg, this sort of European-style foggy city on the banks of the Neva in the far northwestern corner of this kind of closed world where everybody is plotting and there's just this sort of miasma of sort of, I don't know, morbid kind of introspection and stuff. There's been the revolution in 1905. So they've lost a war to the Japanese. Troops have fired on the crowds. There's been rioting and all sorts of disturbances across the country. And Nicholas has been forced to grant effectively a constitution, a constitutional monarchy, which is the one thing he never wanted to do because his father had told him told him you know that way lies degeneracy and you must rule as an autocrat and you must never give up any of

your authority so just when they're at their lowest ebb they meet rasputin and i think a lot of it is that they see him as the as the sort of soul of russia at a time when no they have no friends and they feel they have no political allies and all their family hate them. Kind of old Russia, the heart of old Russia. Because he, yes, yeah. Because he's quite conservative, isn't he, politically, Rasputin? Incredibly. You know, he sort of says...

He has an absolutely medieval sense of the Tsar. Exactly. As the God-appointed father of... So he basically says exactly... Because Alexandra knows that Nicholas has the spine of an amoeba. Yeah. And so he basically she's very keen for him to hang around with rasputin because she thinks rasputin will sort of

you know we'll man him up exactly we'll man him up and rasputin is constantly saying you know be strong the people love the czar they hate the politicians all this kind of stuff um but i suppose rasputin also it's not just what he says, it's how he's, because he is charismatic, isn't he? He has these amazing eyes, doesn't he? I mean, that's the thing everybody goes on about, that they kind of burn and blaze and reach deep into you. And he has this persona.

So he plays the part of the kind of holy man. He has the beard and he, the way he, his sort of peasant, everyone always says he has terrible table manners. He kind of rips apart the food with his hands and all this kind of stuff. But again, that kind of Byzantine idea that, you know, the emperor and the peasant and that in poverty and in kind of the dirt and soil of the peasant lands,

their true Christianity is to be found. Their truth is to be found. And Rasputin is a kind of walking embodiment of that idea. But pretty much straight away, or quite early on, people around the court start saying he's no good. There's something dodgy about him. So you have rumors so there's this story there are these stories that he basically sits on the girls

beds when they're going to bed and stuff he's very fond of kissing isn't he he's very fond of kissing i think he's um he's quite a person he's if you're a mr man he'd be mr tickle i mean he's he's quite handsy and i think um, maybe we should get into Rasputin. Should we have a break and then come back and talk about Rasputin and women, do you think? Do you think that's a good plan? That's an amazing cliffhanger. What a cliffhanger. So we'll be back.

Obviously, if you've just rushed to take up our exciting special offer, you won't be listening to adverts. But if you haven't, you will be. And we will hear you back after the break. I'm Marina Hyde. and i'm richard osmond and together we host the rest is entertainment it's your weekly fix of entertainment news reviews splash of showbiz gossip and on our q a we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works we have just launched our members club if you want ad-free listening bonus episodes and early access to live tickets head to the rest of the entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com regular listeners to um to the show should be familiar now with unheard unherd.com which is the online magazine that's very kindly sponsoring the podcast um and for whom

both of us dominic have written have we not we have indeed they're offering special deal to rest his history listeners three months free subscription which can be cancelled at any time normally one pound a week uh go to unheard.com forward slash rest to claim it um and this week they've suggested a couple of articles that listeners might be interested in, prompted by the theme of Rasputin. Yeah, modern Rasputin. The modern Rasputin that they've cited is Dominic Cummings. Yes. So they've written about him quite a lot on Unheard, they say. So they've got an article, I remember this article actually, by Ares Roussinos. And he basically said that whatever

Dominic Cummings' shortcomings, his analysis of the deficiencies of the state was dead right. Cummings has insisted that the British civil service is essentially unreformable, and perhaps within the framework of the inherited structures of the British state, says Mr Roussinos, he is right. But Tom, not everybody agrees with that, do they? No. So Freddie Sayers, not persuaded at all. Oh, my word. Trying to exercise the persuasive element from government, centralising power in order to bully through the bureaucracy

and trying to run the country like a science project isn't such a great alternative. Is Dominic Cummings Rasputin? I mean, Rasputin never tried to run Russia like a science project. No. But, you know, the idea of the overmighty advisor. Yeah. You know, it's all good stuff.

But no one accused Dominic Cummings of, what would the analogy be, sleeping with the late Prince Philip. I mean... Dominic! That's an absolutely shocking idea that I will now struggle to get out of my mind well decide for yourself go to unheard.com slash rest and now back to the show welcome back to the rest is history maybe you've just been listening to Tom Holland selling you mental health treatments,

or maybe you've been to restishistorypod.com to sign up for our special ad-free service. Either way, great delights await as we talk about Rasputin's record with the ladies. Tom, you have a question? Well, I mean, yeah, so this is the big question, and lots and lots of people ask this. We've got one here from Barry Grogan, a friend of the show. Was he really the lover of the Russian queen and Russia's greatest love machine? Well, he wasn't Russia's greatest love machine. We've already dealt with that.

But was he a lover of the Russian queen? I would say no, definitely not. It would be completely and utterly alien to Alexandra's persona. It would run completely counter to everything we think about her, we know about her. And the very allegation, actually, the weird thing about that Boney M song is what that Boney M song does is it reproduces perfectly these very scatological, kind almost pre sort of french revolution marie antoinette style

kind of pamphlets and cartoons that circulated in the 1910s about rasputin and alexandra that actually if you saw now you would be horrified by their misogyny and their kind of anti-semitism and all these kinds of things um and that whole all of that allegation that she was his lover never ever went away i mean there was nothing they could do to dispel it but it seems to be completely untrue i mean the echoes of marianne trinette are are really fascinating in fact i mean prince yusupov um the guy who ends up killing murdering um rasputin he had um marianne trinette's furniture in his palace it is weird accusations against Marie Antoinette was that that she was sexually insatiable and that she was a lesbian and so

Alexandra she has this friend um Anna V. Rubova yeah Anna V. Rubova I think brilliant I don't know whether that's wonderfully said and And everyone said she had a... She was have... Massive fling with Alexandra. Yes. Which is not true. But actually, they were incredibly pious. And Anna was one of the people who introduced...

You know, she was a massive fan of Rasputin. They'd all sit together and pray. Yeah. And actually, Alexandra called Anna the cow, which was very... You wouldn't call somebody that if you were, you know, leaping into bed with them, would you? I mean, it's very unlikely.

I wouldn't have thought so. But Dominic, I mean, again, so all this, part of the question is how and why do these stories come about? I guess it's essentially the kind of inherent prurience in a pre-revolutionary situation where there's a foreign queen who people don't particularly like that these stories kind of generate and if you've got someone like Rasputin then they they really start to swell and am I not right that there is one incident in particular

oh yes which takes place in 1915 at the Yar which is kind of a restaurant in yeah in Moscow tell us about that so this is one thing that a lot of people who'd known very little about Rasputin may vaguely have heard of. So the First World War has started. We'll come back to the First World War later in the episode. But the First World War has started. Rasputin has gone on a trip to Moscow. And he's gone out with some friends.

And they've gone to this sort of nightclub restaurant. There's gypsy dancers there. And he dances with them. He's a great dancer. He loves dancing. He loves dancing. loves dancing um but but why wouldn't he he's from a peasant village where folk dancing and stuff will be absolutely part of the sort of standard weekly entertainment so it makes sense that he likes dancing so anyway he's

there he's he supposedly interferes with the gypsy dancers kind of cuddling them and groping them and stuff then he gets drunker and drunker we know that Rasputin did like a drink he gets drunker and drunker at the Yahr uh eventually starts shouting about how much you know the the empress loves him and all this sort of stuff and then basically he takes out his penis and starts waving it around and says this is the altar at which the empress worships through this I rule Russia all this kind of thing and stories about this incident spread pretty quickly and have become part of they become absolutely a key part of rasputin's legend and their love machine kind of reputation are they true well they're not true

because this guy douglas smith who wrote this fantastic biography went back and looked at all the police files and he found in the police files that Rasputin that there was nothing about this incident that this absolutely hadn't happened that basically what happened was that the deputy interior minister who is a man called Junkowski that Junkowski had basically put the local um constabulary up to subsequently concocting a report that was fake because he hated Rasputin and he wanted to bring her down and that's absolutely the story of Rasputin in Petersburg is that he's getting it from everybody from his religious rivals so there's a monk called

Iliadur who's kind of conspiring against him the whole time he's a terrible man yes who gets defrocked and imprisoned in a monastery, and then he escapes dressed as a woman. He does, and he ends up in America, doesn't he? Yes. He ends up in L.A. or something eventually. I think he ends up as a kind of doorman. Well, he dies as a doorman. But before then, he's associated with Hollywood. Yeah, brilliant.

So there's him, there's other bishops, but there's also lots of people within the kind of bureaucratic machine who resent rasputin's influence and the weird thing with rasputin is that basically everybody projects onto him everything they don't like about the political situation so people on the left people on the right you know people who are just sort of monarchists well and internationally as well isn't there because because there's um uh there's a's a British diplomat who says that he was at the ER and saw it. Yeah.

And then it turns out actually he was in Kiev all along. Yeah. Is that Robert Bruce Lockhart? He says, yeah, I definitely saw it. Saw remnants of it. The more kind of prominent that Rasputin becomes, the more he becomes a focus of international as well as internal Russian conspiracy theories. Because it becomes a kind of shorthand, I think, doesn't it, for the kind of bonkersness of pre-revolutionary Russia. Yeah, I think so. That you can reduce it all to the relationship

of these three people, Nicholas, Alexandra and Rasputin. And the almost sad thing when you read the stories, their relationship is actually so innocent and almost kind of, it's almost quite childlike, isn't it? Yeah. They get together and they pray and they talk, you know,

the kids look like Rasputin. Our friend. Our friend. I mean, Nicholas and Alexandra send each other these incredibly childish letters where they call each other kind of lovey and all this kind of stuff. And they say, oh, our our friend is coming i can't wait to see him tomorrow isn't it gonna be nice we can talk about god pray and and meanwhile out on the streets people are

distributing these well i mean i i suppose it's fair to say that according to the police records he he did use prostitutes he he had a kind of earthy approach um well he has this kind of slight harem doesn't he he does have a bit of our and um he's compared by his miras to the biblical prophets who all had kind of harems and things well clearly what happens is that um he attracts a lot of kind of i think the word that douglas smith uses is emotionally fraught women. So these are kind of often aristocratic women whose husbands are basically, you know, not the most faithful and are away a lot of the time. And these women have too much time on their hands. They can almost, you know, the storm clouds of revolution are kind of gathering overhead.

They turn to Rasputin for spiritual sustenance but they also end up getting something more um and there's some there's a story about he goes on sort of like the equivalent of a kind of school trip back to his village or something doesn't he with a load of women and there's a lot of groping on the train and then jumping into and out of bunks and stuff like this i mean basically yeah i mean basically he's he's not very well behaved you know he drinks sometimes he but he's not he's not a satire you know he's not um he's not he and he's not i think a rapist this claims that he was a rapist but it seems kind of unlikely not enough store and there's stories like roping but he's so he's some way short of Harvey Weinstein.

I think. Is that fair to say? That's a commendation. Well, so let's look at the slightly more positive side. Yeah. So the key incident that absolutely nails Alexandra's devotion to him is in 1912. At Spala. At Spala.

So they're in a kind of a coach. They're bumping's a kind of hunting lodge isn't it yeah they're in Poland Alexei her son is bit jolted up and down and starts to bleed internally and yeah he's eight I think isn't he and they all think he's going to die and the doctors are kind of giving up on him. And Alexandra writes to Rasputin. And Rasputin is in his village in Siberia. And Rasputin writes back, God has heard your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The little one will not die.

Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much. And these words come true. Yeah, learn bold. Now, the interesting thing is why and as far as i can tell the latest thinking is that basically if rasputin's words have any effect at all they're just a complete placebo effect they calm alexandra she completely believes in rasputin so she really calm alexi as well who also well because if your mum is but if your mum if you're eight and you are bleeding internally to death and your mum is is is rushing around your bedside and the doctors are prodding you and yeah so it's that line don't allow the doctors to bother him yeah the doctors

because the doctors are making it worse and uh and then if your mum gets a telegram and says oh my gosh it's going to be all right you know you will relax and the argument is that alexa's blood pressure falls a little bit and he stops bleeding and or maybe it was a miracle well maybe it was a miracle it happens clearly he has an effect on the royal and the imperial family which is this very emotionally sort of intense household clearly he does calm them down yeah they like being with him he tells them what they want to hear about how the Russian people love them. They talk about God and nature and stuff like that. It's like a massive Sunday school.

And that's what makes the story quite tragic in a way. I mean, he is badly behaved outside the palace. But I mean, badly behaved. Not terribly. Yeah, badly behaved is possibly too strong, isn't it? And the thing is, he's not a priest, is he? No. He's not a priest is he um no he's not a monk uh he's he's a man of god which is different it's it's not like he's breaking any vows no he's not exactly he's long he's got a long-suffering wife back in you know wherever

it is but krov square but i don't think you know you don't get the impression she's terribly bothered it's this kind of byzantine strain within russia where it's it's it's it's kind of less significant than it is say in a catholic or even protestant tradition um so i think yeah uh so there's that and then and then 1914 so that letter that that we opened yeah he sends that from his sickbed, though, doesn't he? So we've got a question from the Reasonable Doctor. Is there any good evidence that he did warn Tsar Nicholas that if Russia went to war against the Central Powers, then Sardin would collapse?

I mean, kind of. Yeah, there absolutely is. That is kind of what he's saying. So he'd said that two years before in the Balkan Wars, by the way. He'd said, don't go to war two years earlier. So he's an anti-war figure. Yeah. Like a lot of the Russian peasantry, they don't like war generally.

When Russia goes to war, the reaction of most of the Russian peasants is horror because they think, well, God, we'll just be slaughtered by our incompetent officers. And they will. They are. Yeah, and they are. And what's really interesting is that basically, what is it, nine days, I think, something like nine, you know, 11 days before the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, Rasputin has himself been the victim of an assassination attempt. So he has been stabbed in his home village by a woman called Kionya Guseva, who has no nose. Like the person who Nelson gave the snuffbox to.

Right, exactly. There's a definite theme here. But did you see the photo of her? She looked very unsettling, I thought. So she has no nose. Her nose has disappeared. I don't know whether it's some talk that it might be syphilis or something. She has no nose.

She's as mad as a hatter. She has visions of the devil. But she's also been put up to it, it seems, by Rasputin's rival, Iliador, this monk who ends up fleeing to America. So Rasputin has been stabbed. He pulls through. And it's basically amid this. So he's away from Nicholas.

Now, there is a slight what if. If he'd been there in St. Petersburg, could he have stopped Nicholas from going to war? I don't think he could, actually. His influence, I think, is a bit overstated. Clearly, he is influential, but not that influential. When all the army commanders are basically saying, we have to go, we have to mobilize,

we have to stand by Serbia. But Rasputin definitely says, disaster will, you know, don't do this. And Nicholas does. Yeah. So he goes to war. And then Nicholas makes the stupid, stupid mistake of saying, I will take supreme command of the army.

So he previously had had his, what is it, his uncle or something, Grand Duke Nikolai, who's a man who wants, did you see this at a dinner party? Grand Duke Nikolai once was asked how good his sword was and he said i'll show you he drew his sword and um sliced a bull's eye dog down the middle have you you haven't seen the great have you no that's exactly the kind of that's exactly the kind of thing that happens in that but he sliced his own dog i mean his own it says like his own beloved pet well dominic if you watch the

great you will not be surprised right that happened well anyway this man didn't prove a very good commander of russia's arms nicholas boots him out and says i'll take command of myself which is an absolute catastrophe for the monarchy because it means that everything will now be laid at his door there's no one for him to fire and andrasputin and alexandra both know this and so that kind of further cements their relationship because they're back in petersburg yes kind of fretting about this yeah and nicholas is aware what's called stavka which is in modern day belarus in place called mogilev so stavka is the army headquarters so he's stuck there hundreds of miles away and that means that all the attention

back in petersburg is now on alexandra and rasputin and everybody says they are running the country they are selling us to the germans and you get this absolute kind of upsurge in 1915 1916 of incredibly pornographic aggressive um sort of attacks on rasputin alexandra they're russian spies they're in league with the Jews, all of this kind of stuff actually, which gives you a sense I think, reading about Rasputin you do get a much stronger sense of the climate of the Russian Revolution and the violence of the 1920s and so on

because you see just how poisonous that atmosphere was in the mid-1910s I know, imagine if they'd had social media things could have got really bad but the weird thing also is Rasputin is quite smart so Rasputin says the whole time there's not enough food for the cities

you need to get more food did you see these absolutely shambolic letters that he sends to the Minister of Agriculture Tom? no I miss them so Rasputin is barely literate so he sends these notes to the Minister of Agriculture. This is, I think, 1916 or 1915, 1916.

Kind, dear apologies, forgive me, much meat is needed. Let Peter eat. Listen, help, Rasputin. Kind, dear apologies for the strange trouble, dear. Let them eat, not starve. They asked to eat, Rasputin. I mean, if you got that and you were the secretary of state for agriculture you'd be motivated to change policy wouldn't you well i suppose yes or

or perhaps think we've got to get rid of this guy and um murder him which yeah is in the end of 1916 what happens that's what happens isn't it and we get our second cross-dresser. Oh God, Prince Yusupov. Prince Yusupov. Now he's an awful man. Isn't he a terrible, terrible man? Claimed to be descended from the pharaohs and the nephew of the Prophet Muhammad, apparently. Yes.

And also, and I'm sorry to say, an Oxford man. A member of the Bullingdon Club. And a member of the Bullingdon Club. So I think it was Stephen Clarke, friend of the show, said, is he the only member of the Bullingdon Club and a member of the Bullingdon Club so I think it was Stephen Clarke friend of the show said is he the only member of the

Bullingdon Club to have murdered somebody I don't know I'm sure the Bullingdon Club have murdered more people than

just Rasputin well according to the play about them I saw they did yeah really but that may not

be strictly accurate so Felix is a he's an that's right i remember that so felix is an absolute spoiled brat isn't he's the second son his dad bought his mom a mountain for her birthday yeah he is this sort of he is a man that once you makes you want to be a leninist because he is the sort of embodiment of kind of greedy, grasping, entitled

Russian, yeah, elitist privilege. And he decides that he's going to kill Rasputin with a couple of other guys. There's a guy called Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich and a man who's sometimes been described as the first fascist, who's called Vladimir Pulishkevich, who's like an ultra-nationalist, anti-Semite, all of these. And bizarrely, they think that by killing Rasputin, they will shore up the monarchy, because they think it's only Rasputin who is damaging the monarchy.

So they come up with this scheme, don't they? They get cyanide, they get pistols, and they set a date, the 16th of December, 1916. And do you want to tell the story, Tom? Because it is a good story. Yes. So Yusupov comes in person to pick Rasputin up from his house. And it's kind of midnight, isn't it?

It is, yeah. Everyone thinks it's a bit weird to be... Yeah. And they drive back and Rasputin walks in and Yankee Doodle Dandy, what is it? Yankee Doodle Dandy is playing on the... They've basically set up this room, haven't they? This basement or something. Yeah, with cakes.

They specially furnished it in a certain way. Absolutely laced with cyanide and all kinds of stuff. And also Madeira, poisoned Madeira. So this is, it has to be emphasised, this is the story that is told later by Yusupov. We'll come back to that. But according to him, Rasputin sits down, gobbles down a whole plate of cyanide-laced cakes. Shed loads of cakes.

Unbelievable. Shed loads of cakes, massive cakes, huge. Yeah. Then he knocks back an entire bottle of poison Madeira. It has no effect on him. None. None whatsoever. So then they shoot him.

Well, doesn't Yusupov say, have a look at this crucifix? You'd want to look at it because I'm about to shoot you. Then he basically shoots him. Three times. I think, does he shoot him three times at first or does he shoot him? Then he says to his comrades and he says i've killed rasputin let's go and construct our alibi and stuff so they drive back and bury his body but they drive back to rasputin's house first of all and one of them

walks around in rasputin's hands be him to fool people then they go back to the the moika palace which is the place where they've killed him, and to get the body. And Rasputin... It's like Fatal Attraction. It is. Rasputin is bending down. Rasputin's eyes open and he kind of leaps up. Yusupov says...

I have to read this because it is funny. Anyway, it's a terrible story. Yusupov says, A wild roar reckoned through the vaulted rooms. He rushed at me, trying to get at my throat and sank his fingers into my shoulder like steel claws.

I realise now who Rasputin really was. It was the reincarnation of Satan himself who held me in his clutches and would never let me go until my dying day. So that really happened. And what is interesting is that he is writing this against the backdrop of the kind of the first horror films so nosferatu and everything and you it's not too hard to see where he's getting the idea for all this kind of

imagery yusupov probably himself isn't even writing it's a ghost writer right yeah yeah and also is it not the case that this is some scholars have said this is clearly actually a rip-off of a dostoevsky short story called the landlady yeah so yusupov is almost certainly making all this stuff about rasputin coming back to life there's even claims in crime and punishment yeah with the old lady uh yes so raskolnikov the murderer of this old moneylender in Crime and Punishment, he lived, supposedly, you know, fictionally, about three blocks from where Rasputin is murdered. I mean, it's a kind of incredible synergy there. It absolutely hangs over it all, doesn't it? And they take his body, don't they, suppose, and they dump it in the ice.

And one of the kind of, one of the favorite stories, even then he's supposed to have scratched at the ice yeah utter balderdash apparently so i mean basically what even the poison cakes supposedly aren't true because his baris britain's daughter said he hated leaks yeah yeah he didn't he didn't like had our sweet tooth at all he'd never have eaten or played and so the context for this the context for this is that um yuspov has fled russia after the revolution he doesn't have any money yeah so he needs to he needs to make it as sensational as possible but they definitely we do know because there was an autopsy the record of the autopsy is lost but we do have interviews by the doctor who did the autopsy a year or so later and he said basically when they pulled Rasputin's body out of the river because the police find a boot and a sort of trail of

blood they pull Rasputin's body out he has been shot three times um and and that's it so clearly these guys just basically shot it and Nicholas and Alexandra are devastated, absolutely devastated. And obviously it doesn't rescue the monarchy, as the assassins hoped, because, I mean, they've only got weeks left before the monarchy is going to fall and the bread riots and St. Petersburg and army mutinies and so on. And they're kind of doomed themselves, aren't they? And there's tragic detail about when they are... So they're killed, obviously, more than a year later by the Bolsheviks. They basically are taken to Siberia.

So they make the reverse journey, the Romanovs, to the one that Rasputin has made. So Nicholas, Alexandra, the four girls, and Alexei. And when they're taken down to a basement, as Rasputin was, to be shot by the Bolsheviks, the girls all have amulets around their necks with Rasputin's picture and a prayer, I think, that he had written.

Topaz stones, isn't it? Yeah. That's kind of sewn in. But as they go down, they go past pornographic graffiti showing Alexandra and Rasputin having sex with Nicholas kind of sitting impotently on the side side so that's the last things that they see it's it's it's that is so sad actually i think it is a sad story there is something it is there is something slightly

readers digest about the uh the fate of the romanovs you know if you're a sort of um a middle-aged woman in 1950s tuscaloosa. This is the kind of thing you read about and gets you very worked up. But actually, I think it is a genuinely kind of moving story. I mean, they're completely out of their depth. You know, they're not great people, Alexandra and Nicholas. They're kind of hapless. But being murdered in a basement

is probably not the fate you'd have wanted for them, just like Rasputin being shot and thrown into the river. Yeah, so, so I mean what I have kind of reading about it and the the contrast between the the incredible stories and what seems to be the truth I mean it kind of it's quite sobering you know when I think about all the stories told about various Roman emperors I was about to say, yeah. You really kind of... Because why... So I guess there's a question here. Karl Johan. Rasputin's penis is famously available to see in a sort of pickled state.

But where does the idea for that come from? Are there lots of pickled penises lying around in Russia? Patently European, is the pickled dick real? So I guess, you know, why? Obviously, it's not. No, because his body was, he wasn't castrated after his death, as some people claim,

and his body was burned. So it's not him. So why are these stories? Why is all the stuff that you get in in uh bony m's single there i i it's the it's the kind of the swirl of factional and religious rivalries where people opposed to him have reasons to come up with these stories it's i i guess the the the relaxation of censorship after after 1905 that yes yeah newspapers can start writing this stuff um the revolution kind of you know there's there's absolute free reign to it there's royalists arguing that um

you know he he destroyed the monarchy without him it would all have been fine um and people on the left who see him as symptomatic of the decadence of the Romanov monarchy and the church. Yeah, absolutely. But also it's, it's also us. I mean,

our natural prurience, right? I mean, the fact that we're doing Rasputin as a subject, the fact that so many people sent in questions, it reminds me a tiny bit of Mary. We asked Mary Beard about gladiators, you know,

isn't it weird that the Romans like gladiators? And she pointed out quite reasonably. We like them too. We don't like to watch them, but we like to talk about them. We all like to go to see the Colosseum. We kind of have our cake and eat it. And in a sense, I think that's what we do with Rasputin. Rasputin also, for Westerners, doesn't he also reinforce

a sense of Russia as Eastern? Oh, as Russians. Yeah, that's the last line of the song, isn't it? I mean, that's basically this sense that this is what happens in Russia. It's an exotic world of people who castrate themselves and whip themselves. Isn't it also, though, that a lot of the source material for his life wasn't available during the Soviet Union? But you know the interesting thing? The Soviets were very down on Boney M.

So Boney M, when they released music in Russia, were not allowed to include that song. Why was that? Because basically the Kremlin didn't like people, you know. Being rude about the Romanos. No, I think they thought it probably glamorised the Romanos and glamorised Rasputin and that this was basically. Oh, I see. This was an inappropriate way to think about this.

What they would have said was a terrible chapter in Russian history, I guess. Supposedly, even when Bonian played in Poland, the Polish authorities said, don't do Rasputin. You know, it's not our overlords are not very happy with it. But now there are people who do think he was a saint in russia who i mean just as there are people who who see nicholas and and alexandra as saints they see you know he's been uh he has been rehabilitated and i think there are there are kind of nationalist historians yes who say that rasputin has been framed who that um actually he never you, he never groped women,

all of these kinds of things. So they've almost gone to the opposite extreme. And they say he's just been smeared by kind of foreign propaganda and stuff. So it is an extraordinary story. And actually, you know, Tom, it does make me think about Suetonius and the Twelve Caesars and all those sources for Roman emperors that are wallowing in the same kind of pornographic material.

Because the, you know, Iliadore's kind of muckraking that he wrote in America and Yusupov's book, you can kind of imagine, you know, if those are the only sources that you have in 2000 years time, what would you make of Rasputin? I mean, it'd be very difficult to, I mean, it would be impossible to get beneath it. So yeah, really fascinating.

So a fascinating story in itself and fascinating historiographically. And with that, I think rah, rah, Rasputin. Do we want to remind people, Tom, of our fascinating club, our really exciting club? Yeah, we do, we do. So it's breastishistorypod.com, live stream and

the bonus episode and yeah this exciting discord chat room uh yeah you can we'll so we'll put a reading list on that we'll put um books on about recipes you particularly enjoyed um all that kind of stuff uh and you'll get bonus episodes so if you have further thoughts about this that you'd like us to talk about uh in next week's episode put them there let us know um put it on twitter whatever uh so uh lots to look forward to um and our next episode is i'm delighted to say on the subject of cricket to mark the start of the ashes so we'll see you on there on thursday goodbye thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad-free listening