This is excellent! Incidentally I got this e-mail a few days back. It’s an interesting read and hope it helps. 
Grigory Yefimovich Novykh (a.k.a. Rasputin) was an unkempt “healer” who wandered into St. Petersburg around 1903 and gave everyone the creeps–everyone except Czarina Alexandra, the empress of Russia.
Friends in High Places
Czarina Alexandra became convinced that only this self-proclaimed holy man from Siberia could improve the health of her sickly son, the heir to the throne. For a decade, she followed Rasputin’s advice. Around the czarina, he played the part of a pious monk, but he was actually a notorious carouser. “Rasputin,” the surname he adopted, means “debauched one.”
The rest of the court despised Rasputin, but the royal family wouldn’t listen to a bad word about him. Czar Nicholas ignored reports that his wife’s chief adviser was a licentious drunk who kept sidling up to ladies, offering to heal them if they touched him the right way. He even ignored rumors that Rasputin was “healing” the czarina herself. Those who criticized Rasputin found themselves summering in Siberia–and wintering there, too.
Rasputin reached the height of his influence around 1915. With Czar Nicholas away at war, the czarina depended on Rasputin’s often bad advice for running the empire. Fed up, the czar’s nephew-in-law, Feliks Yusupov, and the czar’s cousin, Dmitry Pavlovich, enlisted accomplices and plotted to assassinate the powerful peasant. No one knows exactly what happened the night Rasputin died, but everyone agrees that Rasputin was a hard man to kill. The basic story goes like this.
Strike 1: Cyanide
In December 1916, Yusupov invited Rasputin for a late-night rendezvous at his home, using his pretty young wife as bait. When Rasputin arrived, his host had cyanide-laced wine and teacakes laid out for him. Yusupov told Rasputin that his wife was entertaining some other company elsewhere in the house, but that she would be joining them shortly. As the two men sat waiting in a little dining room, Yusupov urged his intended victim to have a snack and a glass of wine.
Though Rasputin was known as a disgusting guzzler, he imbibed only a little wine that night, and he declined the poisoned pastries–too sweet, he said. Eventually, he had a teacake. Yusupov watched for signs that the poison was taking effect, but two hours after he should have been dead, Rasputin was still waiting politely for the lady of the house.
Yusupov was spooked. He left Rasputin, regrouped with the other conspirators–who were waiting in a nearby room–and explained that their victim wasn’t dying very quickly. When he re-entered the dining room, Yusupov carried a gun.
Strike 2: Bullets (and Strikes)
Yusupov shot Rasputin, who fell to the floor, twitched and jerked, and then lay still. The others rushed in and were relieved to see Rasputin dead. Then the gang trouped back upstairs and began to celebrate their daring deed.
Perhaps an hour later, Yusupov went downstairs to check on the body. Rasputin was a little too . . . warm. The next thing the others knew, Yusupov was shrieking that Rasputin was still alive. In fact, the man they had poisoned and shot was trying to escape across the courtyard.
Pavlovich, the czar’s cousin, chased Rasputin down and shot him twice–once in the back and once in the head. The gang then dragged the body back into the Yusupov home just as a policeman arrived to ask about all the commotion. The policeman questioned a servant about the noise, seemed satisfied with his answers, and moved on. Meanwhile, in the house, Yusupov lost control. He grabbed a dumbbell and pounded Rasputin’s body mercilessly.
Strike 3: He’s Drowned
By now, Rasputin had been poisoned, shot him three times, and beaten with a two-pound dumbbell. But his murderers were taking no chances. They tied Rasputin up, carried him out to the car, drove onto a bridge over the Neva River and pitched him in through a hole in the ice. His body was found about a week later.
Yusupov and Pavlovich braced themselves to stand trial, but the czar exiled them instead. Ironically, that punishment ended up saving their lives. Getting kicked out of Russia months before the Bolshevik Revolution was the best thing that could have happened to relatives of the czar. In July 1918, the Bolsheviks killed off most of Russia’s royals.
Colleen Kelly
December 14, 2004