Grigori Rasputin
A Siberian peasant mystic whose sway over Russia's last empress, through her hemophiliac son, helped discredit the monarchy on the eve of revolution.
Grigori Rasputin was not a monk, and probably not mad. He was a Siberian peasant, born around 1869 in the village of Pokrovskoye, who reinvented himself as a wandering holy man and talked his way into the most exclusive circle in Russia: the private world of the last tsar. His hold there rested on one desperate secret. The heir to the throne, Alexei, had hemophilia, and when the boy bled Rasputin seemed able to calm him when the court doctors could not.
The healer at court
Empress Alexandra, German-born, devout, and frantic about her son, came to see Rasputin as a man sent by God. Whether he healed anything is unknowable. He may simply have kept away the doctors and their aspirin, which thins the blood, or offered a calm that eased the bleeding. What matters is that Alexandra believed, and her belief turned a semi-literate peasant into a fixture at the Romanov court. To aristocrats who prized bloodline and rank above all else, the sight of this coarse Siberian whispering to the empress was an outrage that curdled into rumor.
The rumors and the war
Rasputin's actual power has been endlessly inflated, but it was real enough to poison the monarchy's image. When Nicholas II left for the front in 1915 to command the army in person, he left Alexandra running the capital and Rasputin at her elbow. Ministers rose and fell in dizzying succession, several of them his favorites. To a hungry, losing country the story wrote itself: a drunken charlatan and a German-born empress were selling out Russia while its men died. Most of the lurid tales of orgies and treason were exaggeration or invention by his enemies, but in wartime the perception was the reality, and it stripped the crown of its last dignity.
The murder that changed nothing
In December 1916 a clique of aristocrats led by Prince Felix Yusupov set out to save the dynasty by killing him. They included a grand duke of the imperial family and a right-wing member of parliament, men convinced that removing Rasputin would restore the crown's honor. Yusupov's memoir gave the world the famous version: cyanide-laced cakes and wine that did nothing, a pistol shot Rasputin shrugged off, more bullets, and finally a drowning under the ice. The autopsy tells a plainer tale. There was no poison in his stomach, and he died of a gunshot to the head before his body was pushed into the Malaya Nevka river. The legend of the unkillable monk grew with every retelling.
It saved nothing. The killing removed a symbol without touching the rot it symbolized. Less than three months later, amid the bread riots and army mutinies of the February Revolution, Nicholas II abdicated, and three centuries of Romanov rule were over. The peasant had owed everything to one sick child. Within another year and a half that child, and the whole imperial family, were shot in a Yekaterinburg cellar, in July 1918.