Word: rasputin
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...same could not be said of Russia. "Rasputin took the empire by stopping the bleeding of the Tsarevich," the British geneticist J.B.S. Haldane observed. Alas, the empire was hemorrhaging too, and the hypnotic Siberian peasant only exacerbated that wound...
Alex de Jonge-an Oxford professor of Russian ancestry-takes Grigorii Efimovich Rasputin's rise to power to be one of history's tragic jokes. The Tsarina thought Rasputin a saint because he could apparently heal her son; and because he was a saint, he must be heeded in all matters. The Tsar did not lag far behind in credulity...
Little is known about Rasputin's early life. The man who told the Tsar who succeeding ministers should be and where to deploy troops appears to have been an ex-horse thief. Certainly he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. At the end of a night spent listening to gypsy music, he would reel after prostitutes, the gold cross the Tsarina had given him swinging from his neck...
...insolent ambitions had the power to make troubled people feel better-to lighten souls, as De Jonge puts it. Animals and children loved him. In his own way he wanted to be what the Tsar and Tsarina believed him to be: the savior of Holy Russia. But even if Rasputin had been an angel, he would have been too late. "A kind of frenzy has seized people," Princess Catherine Radziwill wrote in 1913. Russia had turned into a "very large lunatic asylum" of manic searchers, from table-tapping spiritualists to bomb-tossing anarchists. The whole country seemed possessed by demons...
Prince Felix Yusupov believed he was saving Holy Russia too, when, after midnight on Dec. 17, 1916, he lured Rasputin to his palace and fed him cream cakes laced with cyanide. When the poison failed to take effect, the prince shot him. Left for dead on the floor, Rasputin opened one mad eye, then leaped up in an attempt to strangle his shocked assassin. Another conspirator had to fire more bullets. When the corpse was dragged out of the river near Petrovsky Bridge, water was found in the lungs. In the end, Rasputin may have drowned. Siberian peasants...