Regular Episode
#188 – DISPUTIN’ RASPUTIN
The episode is part of MonsterTalk’s ongoing series on humans as monsters — and Grigori Rasputin turns out to be a case study in how political enemies, a sensationalist press, and credulous aristocrats can collaboratively construct a legend that outlasts the man by more than a century.
🕯️ The Silver Age and the Hunger for Holy Men
Smith explains that Rasputin was only possible in a very specific cultural moment: the Silver Age of Russian culture (roughly 1890–1914), when the Petersburg elite were obsessed with séances, ectoplasmic manifestations, hypnosis, and occult contact with other realms. Western Spiritualism and Theosophy had migrated east from American and European cities, but Russia had something the West lacked: the figure of the strannik, the wandering peasant holy man — untrained, unordained, but supposedly carrying the living spirit of God. Rasputin was one of many such figures, but he was the one who found the right soil.
Siberia, Smith notes, matters here too. Rasputin’s home village of Pokrovskoye in western Siberia was part of a region that never practiced serfdom — Siberian peasants were legally free and notably independent, a fact Smith argues was essential to producing someone with Rasputin’s confidence and personal magnetism.
👁️ The Gaze, the Placebo, and the Healer Who Didn’t Claim to Heal
One of the book’s more nuanced findings is that Rasputin himself was cautious about claiming healing powers. He prayed, laid on hands, and let others project miraculous abilities onto him — a dynamic Karen recognizes immediately as matching Braco the Gazer, the Croatian faith healer who stands silently on stage gazing at paying audiences without ever making explicit claims. The comparison prompts Smith’s dry observation: “Clearly, this man has read up on Rasputin.”
Smith frames Rasputin’s apparent healing successes — most famously his apparent ability to calm the hemophiliac Tsarevich Alexei — in terms of the mind-body connection and the placebo effect. When a patient (or a terrified parent) believes deeply in a healer’s power, measurable physiological change can follow. Blake adds the statistical layer: recoveries that coincide with the natural downward arc of an illness get attributed to whichever treatment happened to be running at the time, and those stories then raise expectations for the next patient.
👑 Getting to Court: Monsieur Philippe and the Black Crows
Smith traces Rasputin’s path to the Romanov inner circle through a predecessor: a French charlatan known as Monsieur Philippe, who claimed to predict the future, heal by touch, and even determine the sex of a baby in utero. Empress Alexandra had him brought to St. Petersburg, but courtiers smelled the fraud and had him expelled. Before leaving, Philippe planted a prophecy: a new friend would one day appear in his place.
That open slot was filled when two Montenegrin princesses married into the Romanov family — the so-called Black Crows — introduced Rasputin to Nicholas and Alexandra as a Siberian man of God. Alexandra, already primed by Philippe’s prophecy, was immediately captivated. Rasputin’s appearance seemed to confirm the foretelling — a textbook case of confirmation bias dressed in religious clothes. Once secure at court, Rasputin discarded the Black Crows entirely, and they promptly became two of his most energetic rumor-spreaders.
Karen draws a parallel to the Maitreya prophecy tradition — the idea of a coming world teacher heralded by someone else — noting that Benjamin Creme (1922–2016), the British artist who spent decades announcing Maitreya’s imminent public emergence, had recently passed away.
🗞️ Fake News, Aristocratic Snobbery, and the Profit Motive
Smith identifies three interlocking engines of the Rasputin myth machine:
– Class resentment. Aristocrats were furious that an illiterate Siberian peasant had more access to Nicholas and Alexandra than they did. Descriptions of Rasputin as dirty, smelly, and unwashed are, Smith argues, entirely class-based slander — police records and contemporary accounts show he visited the bathhouse regularly and kept himself clean.
– Political weaponization. For revolutionaries and Romanov critics, Rasputin was a gift. Outlandish stories about him functioned as proxy attacks on the legitimacy of the dynasty itself. Smith calls it “one of the early moments of fake news” — a phrase he immediately admits to disliking, but uses anyway for accuracy.
– Tabloid economics. Russia’s newly liberalized press in the early 1900s quickly discovered that papers with Rasputin stories sold. Editors fabricated interviews, ran unverified rumors, and ignored his written protests. Rasputin, Smith notes drily, was experiencing the paparazzi before the word existed.
☠️ The Death: Myth vs. Autopsy
If there is one story everyone knows about Rasputin, it is his death — and almost every element of the popular version is false. The legend (elaborated across multiple editions of Prince Felix Yusupov‘s self-serving memoirs) involves poisoned wine and cakes that had no effect, multiple gunshots that failed to kill, a strangling attack on Yusupov, and a body dumped through the ice of the Neva River — with the autopsy supposedly finding water in the lungs, meaning he survived all of the above only to drown.
Smith has examined the actual autopsy photographs, now held in a St. Petersburg museum. The real account: Rasputin was shot three times — once through the back, once through the torso, and once through the center of the forehead (what Russian forensics calls a kontrol’ny vystrel, a “control shot”). He was apparently wounded in the cellar, managed to exit through a side door, and was caught in the courtyard and finished off. The autopsy found no water in the lungs — he was dead before he entered the river. Smith’s verdict: a cold-blooded mob-style murder, not a supernatural battle of attrition.
Yusupov himself, in a rare honest moment in his memoirs, described the act as cowardly. Nicholas’s failure to seriously punish the killers was read by all of Russian society as a sign of catastrophic imperial weakness. Smith argues the murder of Rasputin in December 1916 can be seen as the first act of the Russian Revolution — the Romanov dynasty fell less than three months later.
🏰 Aftermath: The Romanovs, Matryona, and What the Myths Were Really About
Several of the Tsar’s daughters were found wearing amulets bearing Rasputin’s image when the Romanov family was executed in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Yekaterinburg in July 1918 — believing, even then, that he might protect them. Smith notes the grim parallel: Rasputin murdered in a cellar in the middle of the night, the Romanovs murdered in a basement in the middle of the night, both sets of killers apparently aware that what they were doing required darkness and concealment.
Of Rasputin’s family, the most remarkable story belongs to his daughter Matryona (Maria) Rasputin, who escaped Russia, performed as a dancer and cabaret act in Berlin and Paris, then worked as an animal trainer in American circuses — until she was mauled by a bear in Indiana in the 1930s. She eventually settled quietly in Los Angeles and died in 1977 or 1978; Smith notes her modest headstone survives in a cemetery near Koreatown. She wrote memoirs and, he suggests, warrants a book of her own.
As for Rasputin’s remains: his body was exhumed after the revolution, driven out of St. Petersburg, and almost certainly incinerated. No physical trace is known to survive, and — unlike Elvis — there were no serious “Rasputin sightings” afterward. People, Smith says, were simply ready to be done with him.
📚 Further Reading
– 📚 Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs 💵 by Douglas Smith
– 📚 The Russian Job: The Forgotten Story of How America Saved the Soviet Union from Ruin 💵 by Douglas Smith
🔗 Related Links
– Grigori Rasputin — Wikipedia
– Felix Yusupov — Wikipedia
– Monsieur Philippe (Nizier Anthelme Philippe) — Wikipedia
– Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) — Wikipedia
– Maitreya — Wikipedia
– Braco the Gazer — Wikipedia
– Tsarevich Alexei and hemophilia — Wikipedia
– Serfdom in Russia — Wikipedia
– 📺 Rasputin — BBC Masters of Darkness documentary
Note: ads inserted into the distributed audio alter the timestamps in unpredictable ways, so timing references in these notes are approximate.
An illuminating discussion about the Russian Monk, Rasputin, by author Douglas Smith. We’ll be discussing the myths and facts about Rasputin as described in Smith’s book, Rasputin: Faith, Power and the Twilight of the Romanovs.
Mentioned in this Episode
- Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith
- Braco the Gazer
- Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) (related to Maitreya prophecy mentioned in the episode)
- Rasputin BBC Masters of Darkness Documentary
Music
- Monstertalk Theme: Monster by Peach Stealing Monkeys
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