Grigory Rasputin has long occupied a peculiar corner of the historical imagination. In popular culture he appears as a kind of pantomime villain: a hypnotic monk with burning eyes, drunkenly staggering through the palaces of St Petersburg while manipulating a feeble Tsar and seducing half the Russian aristocracy. Antony Beevor’s brilliant new biography, Rasputin: And the Downfall of the Romanovs, sets out to disentangle the man from the legend.
What emerges is not only the story of one extraordinary individual, but also a deeply felt portrait of a ruling dynasty so frightened, isolated and dysfunctional that it placed its faith in a wandering Siberian mystic.
