Dispatches from Home – The Beginning and the End. The Rasputin File.

Following up on last week’s book about Nicholas and Alexandra’s lost lives and times, I couldn’t pass up a book about Rasputin, one of the main characters involved in the collapse of the Romanov dynasty. Edvard Radzinski’s “The Rasputin File” begins with this sentence: “On 19 December 1916, just before Christmas in the last December of the Romanov empire, a corpse bobbed to the surface of the Malaya Nevka river in Petrograd.”

For lovers of Russian history, you know that corpse was the battered body of Grigori Rasputin, a semi-literate peasant monk and mystic. He was what the Russian Orthodox Church in those days called a Holy Fool. However, he created an unholy scandal in the gilded palaces and mansions of the Russian aristocracy.

Mr. Radzinski’s book reveals the full extent of Rasputin’s intriguing relationship with Alexandra and her children, especially the heir apparent, Alexei, who suffered greatly from hemophilia. It was the boy’s hemophilia that Rasputin apparently had the “power” to control. And that control was his foot in the door, as it were, to virtually every imperial decision that helped bring down the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty. Was he a Holy Fool or an Unholy Devil? Read the book.

Mr. Radzinski ends his book with thoughts on the 1998 burial of the Royal Family: “They found their resting places in the Peter and Paul Cathedral—across the Neva River from their palace and among the tombs of their ancestors. And all Russia buried them that day. And in the country, there was a long-forgotten sense of joyful union, or a moved, happy ease. As if a stone had fallen away from the soul. As if some terrible spirit had at last released the ‘tsars’ and flown away from Russia for good. Or was it only for a moment? And an illusion, after all?”

(Originally posted September 8, 2021)