Word: rasputine
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...economic crisis. The Duma on Monday rejected Viktor Chernomyrdin as prime minister, while Boris Yeltsin has already accepted a lame-duck presidency by agreeing to relinquish many of his executive powers. That leaves the tycoon kingmaker Boris Berezovsky as the most powerful man in Moscow, but the latter-day Rasputin is not on Clinton's itinerary...
...programs and discussions that all but canonized Nicholas and endorsed autocracy. His Russia, NTV told its viewers, was a country of "order and prosperity." One young historian argued that Nicholas was a statesman of almost supernatural insight, though he gave himself away when he went on to suggest that Rasputin--the Czarina's "spiritual adviser" whose scandalous reputation did so much to discredit the Czar--was given a raw deal. The guiding logic of the programs seemed to be that if the Bolsheviks hated Nicholas, he must have been a wonderful...
...this last element--the villain of the story's formula--that falls hopelessly flat. The most outstanding animated features are those with the strongest villains; think of Cruella de Vil, Ursula and Jafar in Disney's best. Rasputin, however, is a bumbling idiot. He shrieks and whines and has the further distasteful attribute of losing his bodily limbs every so often (apparently, the animators want to make it very clear that villains must be repulsively ugly). Moreover, he seems to have absolutely no motivation for his curses. He constantly howls "The Romanovs must be destroyed!" but there seems...
...basic structure, Anastasia tries its best to mimic the Disney style. Here, it does astonishingly well, and sometimes even surpasses its predecessor. The musical numbers, in particular, are startlingly good. "Journey to the Past," the show-stopping solo for Anastasia, will linger in your head for days as will Rasputin's personal ode to evil...
...itself in history is in a short opening prologue, occurring during an unmentioned First World War, one year after the Russian Revolution in 1916. Somehow, Anastasia, born in 1901, is only eight years old in 1916. With the help of a servant boy, Dmitri, Anastasia manages to escape from Rasputin and his revolutionaries, but falls off a train, hitting her head...