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Rasputin, the Siberian peasant healer who exerted extraordinary influence over the family of Russia's last Tsar, has fascinated the world for more than a century.
In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Anthony Beaver speaks to Danny Bird about his new book Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs, which explores the man behind the myth and the rumour.
From Rasputin's humble origins in Siberia, his hold over Nicholas II and Alexandra, to his dramatic assassination at the hands of the imperial couple's own relatives.
Anthony explores the extraordinary contradictions of a figure who helped doom the Romanovs and their empire.
When people hear the name Rasputin, they tend to picture a dark, almost cartoonish villain shrouded in myth and scandal.
What drew you to his story?
And is there anything you want your readers to unlearn about him from the get-go?
Well, Rasputin, in fact, was an incredibly influential character.
Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government after February 1917 and the revolution, said without Rasputin there would have been no Lenin.
And therefore one has to see and understand how a virtually illiterate peasant from Siberia could have more to do than anyone else in bringing down the greatest autocracy that the world had ever known.
So, from that point of view yes, a phenomenally fascinating period and character of history, but one who's very, very important to know.
And the other thing is that rumour played such a huge part in this, rumours about Rasputin.
And in what we're seeing today, we underestimate the power of rumour and the effect that it can have, and historians have tended to underestimate it in the past.
And, as you referenced there, Rasputin has an illiterate peasant background, but he goes straight to the heart of imperial power and that is an extraordinary story.
What was it about his personality, beliefs, or timing that made that rise possible?
Petersburg.
Society at that time was pretty corrupt and in fact became even more corrupt when the war began.
But the vital thing was that they were fascinated by a so-called man of God who had arrived.
And Rasputin obviously did have extraordinary qualities.
We know about his seductive qualities, but I'm sure we'll have to go on to those later.
But he also had this ability to give the impression that he was a great healer.
And again, another area of debate.
How does one really explain that?
The way that he was able to cure the Empress's or not cure, but at least prevent the suffering or reduce the suffering of the Empress's little boy, the Tsarevich, who suffered from haemophilia.
Could you tell me a little bit about the circumstances of Rasputin's youth?
Well, he was a near-do-well in a village called Prokroskoy, which is in, I think one would say, basically western Siberia, on those sort of rivers with huge forests all around.
And His father was a peasant.
They had a few animals and they worked in the winter with a tarantas and a form of sort of sledge and coach.
And in fact, he was supposedly a drunkard as a teenager even.
But then he suddenly became, having married a very simple but intelligent woman.
He then transformed himself, having some sort of spiritual experiences.
And he received the call of God as far as he was concerned.
How far one believes this or whatever, but there was no doubt that I think he was genuine in that particular way.
But at the same time, that didn't change other aspects of his character which started to, shall we say, emerge later.
And this was his sort of lasciviousness.
He had many contradictions.
He was genuinely religious, intensely so, very spiritual.
He was a lecturer of the worst order.
He claimed that he loved women, but he could also be a rapist at times.
But he had an extraordinary ability both to convince women that he was the only person who understood them which, of course, once he got to St.
Petersburg, where many of them had been basically ignored by their grand husbands.
These were the ones who then started throwing themselves at his feet.
And this is the sort of the fascination of this phenomenon.
I mean the idea of how well in the Bernie M song, you know Laura Rasputin, you know the Russia's greatest love machine.
One has to sort of take that with the other aspect, as I say, which is the spirituality.
But there were many contradictions.
And this is very Russian.
And one of the reasons why he is such an intriguing character.
The great poet, poet of the 19th century, Fyodor Chuchov, said Russia cannot be understood with the mind alone.
And there is a sort of form of spiritual emotion which exists in Russia itself but at the same time can be completely destroyed by so many other things, whether cruelty, whether lasciviousness whatever, but also by corruption.
And he was very generous.
He gave money away and all the rest of it.
And yet at the same time, he was accepting bribes and cash in all directions.
So to paint him in very sort of black tones of evil is as inaccurate as trying to say that actually he was this spiritual man whom the empress worshipped and adored.
I'm delighted that you brought up the Boney M song, because I was wondering if that was going to come up at some point.
Well, I'm not going to sing it for you.
That is one thing I promise you.
That is a great pity, but I understand.
So could you tell me a little bit more about the fact or the circumstances of how he came to the centre of St
Petersburg at that time?
Because as you mentioned, he was born in a very remote part of the Russian Empire.
What was that journey that took him to the center of imperial power?
Well, he announced to his wife poor thing that you know I'm going to leave you because I'm going to go off as a wandering pilgrim, a stranic.
You know, this was in search of enlightenment of God and so forth.
And I mean there were probably around at this particular period.
I'm talking now, right at the beginning of 1903 1904, there were about a million Russians wandering the roads dressed in rags and carrying chains.
It was a form of sort of mortification of the flesh.
And they walked from monastery to monastery where they would pray.
And they would then work, say a little bit for say, a peasant along the way, which would give them enough food to carry on to the next place.
And he visited not just sacred places in Russia of holy monasteries or churches, but even all the way to Mount Athos in Greece.
And then he was in Kazan, on the River Volga, one of the sort of ancient cities of Russia, a Tatar city.
And there there was an important and rich woman who was impressed by him and was convinced that he was a healer as well as being a man of God.
But he was also misbehaving appallingly and persuading young women, including even apparently a 20-year-old and a 15-year-old, to come and wash him intimately in the banya in the hot baths.
And this was very much Rasputin's method of seduction, which was and this is one of the reasons why many people actually suspected him of being a clist.
Now, this was a sect, a religious sect from the 17th century, early 17th century, who believed basically, that you have to sin so as to get redemption.
So it was quite a nice little card trick, if you like, of sort of saying oh well, you know, come and sin with me and then we'll all be redeemed together and all the rest of it.
And that seemed to work pretty well.
And anyway, it worked well in this particular case.
But the mother arrived just too late after Rasputin had redeemed them in the bath.
But anyway, the woman in Kazan, the grand lady in Kazan, put him in touch with a very important bishop there in St.
Petersburg.
And this was his great opportunity.
And the bishop was carried away also by Rasputin's ability to really sort of overcome people's resistance through his spirituality.
And it's very hard to reproduce entirely because obviously we haven't got any filmed recordings of him.
But apparently, I mean, he could quite often be completely incoherent.
So how people sort of really understood what he was saying.
But I mean, the more they seem to fail to understand or whatever, the more they push themselves forward in belief of trying to regard every single word and utterance as holy.
But anyway, he even took in some one or two senior, several senior churchmen, including one who was the confessor of the royal family and also meant a couple of princesses.
One of them was married to a cousin of the Tsar, the Nikolasha, the huge, tall commander-in-chief of the armed forces.
And they then introduced him to the Tsar in November 1905.
And this is important because it was a key moment, because the Tsar had been really humiliated by the disastrous war against Japan, the Japanese-Russian war.
Russia had really been sort of badly beaten by a much smaller nation in that way.
But this had caused uprisings around the country.
And Rasputin, as a result, was able to sort of persuade Tsaritsa that he was somebody to whom they could talk.
And they were both longing to find a simple man of the people with whom that they could commune.
And they were both carried away by him.
A few years earlier, there'd been another, I think, charlatan called Monsieur Philippe, who was French, who had wormed his way into their presence and had convinced them.
And they referred to him as our friend and believed also that he had huge supernatural powers, almost.
And when he left, he said, another will come. another will come.
And this was like a prophecy.
It was almost as if he was John the Baptist and Rasputin was Christ.
In the view I think the subconscious view of the empress.
You paint an intimate portrait of Nicholas and Alexandra's marriage.
Yet their reign was driven by reactionary instincts and a nostalgic vision of a Russia from before the time of Peter the Great.
What does this reveal about czarism as it entered the 20th century?
And how did their faith fears and isolation make somebody like Rasputin so indispensable to them?
I think one has to remember the very important aspect of Russia itself is this whole Slavophil-Westerner split within Russia.
The Slavophils were those who actually did not believe that Russia was Asiatic, but were much closer, if you like, to the Asiatic heritage of Russia itself.
And this is why the Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress hated the whole idea of Peter the Great who, with his building of Petersburg itself, the window on the West, had tried to modernize Russia.
And you know, the old believers who'd all been massacred, or the whole of these attempts to modernize Russia were, And yet, at the same time, the reaction against it with savage repression and revolt.
And this is a sort of complete cycle in Russian history.
They loved Moscow.
They felt that Moscow was the spiritual home of Russia. but that St.
Petersburg was corrupt and was the sort of European distraction, if you like.
And this is one of the reasons why they cut themselves off the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, from Petersburg society.
And do you think that they saw something in Rasputin that spoke to that older, more primal form of Russia?
Absolutely.
This was quite right.
This is absolutely the appeal of Rasputin, you know, coming a man of the people.
This was sort of the old Russia.
And this is why they didn't take seriously the rumors that Rasputin was a clist, because the clists who I mentioned, they were the ones who believed in sort of this whipping.
And they also did sort of whirling dances like whirling dervishes.
And then apparently it all turned into a tremendous sort of mass copulation.
And Rasputin always denied that he was a clerist.
But there were one or two aspects, like for example his emphasis on sin and redemption and so forth, which may well have come from that particular direction.
But the Tsaritsa would not accept any criticism of Rasputin whatsoever, and nor would the Tsar.
Now the question of Rasputin's healing powers, especially concerning the Tsarovich, the heir to the throne.
Alexei's haemophilia sits at the centre of the story about Rasputin and the Russian royal family.
Do you think Rasputin genuinely believed in his abilities or was he consciously exploiting a desperate family?
I mean, it's a subject which I don't think anybody will ever be able to prove in one way or another.
And there are still areas which we do not quite understand.
Funny enough I, when I it was actually the time we were married I really had damaged my back badly.
And I was advised to go to somebody who actually could pass his hands over your back without actually touching it.
And yet it had the most astonishing effect.
So it's a little bit like ghosts, you know, whether you believe in ghosts or not.
But I do think that there are sort of certain areas we do not understand.
And there is no doubt about it, that even the doctors and you read all of their accounts, because of course they were fascinated.
And in many ways embarrassed, because you know there were things that they could not do to stop the terrible suffering which this child went through at times.
And of course, which tore the heart of the empress.
And yet, even from a distance, the Tsaritsa telephoned Rasputin, for example, in the worst crisis, when they were in Polish forest.
And suddenly the boy calmed down.
Now, the doctors say, well, it could have been coincidence that it was about to come down.
It could have been that the mother, because when she was convinced by Rasputin that he would be saved in a sort of intermediate psychosomatic way, she was able to pass on that somehow to the child.
I mean, as I say, there are areas still which I don't think we fully understand.
So I wouldn't sort of rule it out or say he was a total charlatan.
But there is no doubt about it that he could, and perhaps it was the effect of his voice, because he did have an extraordinary voice.
He could calm the child.
And I mean there were others.
For example, a great friend of the empress, Lili Deng, who didn't like Rasputin, didn't really trust him entirely at all.
He, when her little boy was sort of desperately ill, just Rasputin's voice.
The boy suddenly woke up and there was, frankly, this pretty terrifying face over him.
But the boy was completely unafraid and went back to sleep and was perfectly all right in the morning.
And the doctors were utterly astonished at his recovery.
So, as I say, nobody will be able to prove one way or the other.
But there is no doubt about it.
Even if it was pure charlatanism, which I don't think it was 100%.
I'm sure there was a charlatan element.
The point was... that he gave total power to Rasputin and to the empress over her own husband.
And we will come on to that in due course.
Now, one of the most striking aspects of the book is how openly sexual excess manipulation hypocrisy, ran through Russia's aristocracy at this time, which Rasputin, of course, took full advantage of, as we've discussed.
How important is sexual depravity and scandal to understanding both his power and the moral decay of the ruling elite prior to the Russian Revolution of 1917?
Well, it's interesting the way that sort of if you like sex and revolution very much goes together.
I mean, one's only got to think of the French Revolution and the sort of pornographic fantasies about Marie Antoinette and the Princesse de Lamballe and so forth.
And you see very straight echoes of of this at this particular time.
I mean all of the fantasies that the empress was sleeping with Rasputin, that Rasputin was even sleeping with the teenage daughters totally untrue rumors like that.
The vital effect of this, of course, is that in a patriarchal society, when you have rumors and scandals like that, It completely undermines the authority of the Tsar, because there he is looking like a weak and, you know, a cuckold.
But in fact he wasn't a cuckold at all, but he was incredibly naive in the way that he refused to accept that the fact that Rasputin was sort of left alone with the empress, he could turn up at the palace and all the rest of it.
It was bound to spread these sort of rumors. and especially in a society like St.
Petersburg.
But because they were rumours and they were untrue, both he and the Empress rejected them and actually refused therefore, to see the wall of sort of hatred and revolt which was building at that particular time.
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Rasputin never held an official post, yet ministers rose and fell throughout his time and influenced at court.
How did that influence actually work at the Russian court at this point?
And was there anyone working to obstruct his grip on the Tsar and the family?
Well, it came in slow steps, if you like, as one might imagine.
Rasputin didn't have sort of outright power.
He had contacts and influence.
He would write these little notes, which were totally illiterate.
I mean, it was sort of, you know, dearie, please do what this person asked for and things like that.
And I mean, they were quite astonishing.
I mean, General Mosolov, who was the head of the court chancery, found that there was this young singer who turned up, shall we say, with one of the most low-cut dresses he had ever seen in his life, announcing with a note from Rasputin saying that she wanted to be the prima donna of the Imperial Opera.
You know, just on sort of Rasputin's thing.
Moslov had to explain to her, you know, that is not how it works.
And this happened the whole time.
Now some ministers would sort of say, oh yes, I'll have a look at it, or whatever, and then just chuck it in the waste paper basket.
Others were scared that Rasputin, if they didn't do what he asked, would denounce them to the Ratsaritsa and they would lose their post.
So that was it at a low level.
But then it went into a completely different year.
After 1915, when the Tsar was persuaded he wanted to do it himself, but he was confirmed in this idea, particularly by Rasputin and by his wife that he should take over as commander-in-chief of the armies the most disastrous thing he could have done.
He was therefore no longer in Patrograd, as it had then become.
He was at the headquarters, the Stavka, which meant that this gave the opportunity to the Empress and Rasputin to start saying right well, we've got to change him, him and him.
I mean, it is simply staggering the list of provincial governors.
I mean, some 70 were sacked and replaced by people, their own sort of appointees, who they knew would support them.
But also important.
And, in fact, the most important of all, which was always the minister of the interior, as well as even prime ministers, were actually appointed by the Tsaritsa and Rasputin, persuading the Tsar oh, you must do this.
And I understand that the Dowager Empress, Nicholas II's mother, was dead against him.
Well, she was dead against him.
But there was a reason for that, which goes back quite a long way.
And it is fascinating.
There's this diary of Rasputin in the Russian archives which we came across, which apparently has been there since 1921, so just after the end, or 22 just after the end of the Civil War.
And yet experts whose opinion I entirely trust and I also in many ways agree with, say a lot of it is fake.
But there is material in there which has been supported by other sources and this is fascinating.
Was that apparently, when Nicholas II's mother the Dowager Empress as she became was pregnant with him?
She had this terrifying dream that she and her husband, Alexander III, were walking up this hill, or mountain even.
And suddenly this baby appeared in her arms.
She said, what is this baby?
And he said, well, that is your future son.
And the baby then jumps out of her arms and then scrabbles up the mountain ahead of them towards the summit, where there is a peasant in a red shirt and with blazing sort of blazing red with an axe, who chops off the baby's head.
And not surprising, the empress is traumatized by this and gets hold of an old woman who was a sort of wet nurse of the imperial family, who is thought to sort of be able to interpret dreams and things like that.
And she interpreted the dream in a fairly obvious way, as one might imagine after such a sort of vivid scenario as that.
So when, 38 years later, she hears that her son and daughter-in-law have become completely besotted with this person from Siberia, she is simply horrified.
And she is the one right from the start who realizes that this could be appallingly dangerous.
And she leads, if you like, the opposition to Rasputin within the imperial family.
And in fact I mean our neighbor and friend in Kent, Princess Olga Romanov, remembers hearing all about this dream from her father, who actually was, extraordinarily was the brother of the Grand Duchess Ireni, who was married to Yusupov, who murdered Rasputin.
Olga is the same age as me.
And yet her grandmother was Czar's sister.
And as I say, her aunt was married to Yusupov.
It is fascinating.
But also I guess it shows how prevalent that world of prophecy is at this time in Russia that everybody believes in the power of dreams.
Exactly.
Now, Russia entered the First World War in 1914, and that's when everything seems to accelerate in terms of fear, conspiracy and incompetence within the court.
How did the pressures of the war amplify Rasputin's role and the sense that the system was coming apart?
Well, Rasputin's role, as I said, was given this opportunity by the absence.
Nicholas II hated politics.
He hated being asked to make decisions.
And he was, let's face it, he was a weak man.
And like many weak men, he was obstinate, which is a fatal combination.
He was far happier and more relaxed, even though he adored his wife and the family life and the daughters and so forth.
He loved also being in the totally masculine surroundings of the headquarters, the Stavka of the supreme headquarters of all the armies, which was far away.
I mean, you know it was a good sort of day and a half's train journey and so forth, even just to get there.
And so with Nicholas safely out of the way, this really gave the opportunity A for terrible corruption.
I mean, Rasputin was involved in contracts for the underwear of the army.
I don't think he actually made a huge amount of money out of it.
Anyway, he probably would give away the money that he made.
So, I mean, there was this extraordinary thing.
As I say, there was sort of corruption and generosity at the same time, but without really any calculation.
But the real development was those appointments, which I mentioned, of ministers, governors and even, as I say, prime ministers.
And this, in fact— was called and became derided as ministerial leapfrog.
The way that these were changing the whole time, which was chaotic.
I mean time of war.
Unless you have a certain stability, a certain decision-making process and chain of command which is clear, you're not going to achieve anything.
And here they were changing people around at the slightest thing and on a frequent basis and without any really clear direction on who was to do what.
And the worst of all was when they appointed because he was a great admirer of the Empress and of Rasputin too Protopopov, who was in fact seemingly a very good candidate because actually he was slightly more liberal.
He got on well with the Duma, the Russian parliament.
He was vice president of the Duma at this particular time.
But then he became completely obsessed with the Empress.
And the problem was he had syphilis.
And syphilis, which was otherwise known as terminal of the insane, was actually talking to icons.
He believed he could commune with the dead.
He persuaded Rasputin to tell the Tsar to make him in charge of all the train transport all over Russia.
Now, this was absolutely vital in getting food to the cities.
So I mean the very fact that the trains all froze solid.
There wasn't actually a great shortage of food at that particular time.
It was simply that it couldn't be got to the cities which really needed it, especially Petrograd.
And this is also what led directly to the revolution of February 1917.
The circumstances of Rasputin's assassination are almost legendary.
Could you talk us through what unfolded?
And stripping away the legend, what do you think his killers really believed they were doing?
Well, the killers on the whole extreme right-wing reactionaries.
The key figures were Prince Felix Yusupov, who married the Tsar's favorite niece, and Princess Irene, Grand Duchess Irene.
His great friend was also Grand Duke Dmitry Pavlovich, much later on, actually afterwards, lover of Coco Chanel.
And Dmitry Pavlovich was actually the Tsar's favorite nephew or cousin and was regarded as a possible, even heir to the Tsar if the Tsarevich died from his hemophilia.
Because the Tsar thought he could marry, he was very popular and dashing, etc., etc.
He could marry the eldest daughter, Grand Duchess Olga, because she didn't want to leave Russia.
She didn't want to go marry a foreign prince or king or anything like that.
So that was always thought of as a possibility.
So it's truly astonishing that here the great favorite Rasputin, the great favorite of the Tsar and the Tsaritsa, is being targeted for assassination by a favorite, and by Prince Yusupov, but also by another extreme monarchist, a complete anti-Semite and leader of the Black Hundreds, Vladimir Poreshkevich.
He was a populist leader of a type one could certainly recognize today.
He was brilliantly insulting, could be very funny, a very clever speaker.
And he had an extraordinary following, even amongst sort of, you know, ordinary people.
Cartoons of him, even sort of models of his billiard ball head.
He was completely bald and yet had sort of this big black mustache and beard.
But he was, for example, in sort of calculated provocations.
On sort of the International Workers' Day.
He would make a speech in the Duma with a carnation tucked into his fly buttons as a deliberate insult to the working class.
It was fascinating to see sort of this conspiracy of these three major factors.
There were a couple of others who worked with it.
There have also been many theories that the British Secret Service was somehow involved.
They knew about it in advance, but I've come across no real evidence, or convincing evidence actually, that they had a hand in the killing itself.
And I think from the autopsy and so forth and of the accounts there at the time, it was these three.
And the idea was for Yusupov to become friends with Rasputin, even though he loathed him, and to tempt Rasputin into an ambush.
And the ambush would take place in the great Moika Palace in St.
Petersburg, which belonged to the Yeltsin family, the grandest and certainly the richest family by far in the whole of Russia.
And his wife was going to be used as the bait because she was so beautiful and well-known and the Tsar's niece, and so forth.
And Rasputin was longing to meet her.
So all of this was done.
And of course there was the huge paradox here that Rasputin was known or thought to be a clairvoyant and could sort of foresee the future.
But he couldn't foresee his own death, even right up until the final second, when he saw the gun pointing at him.
And do we know the circumstances that unfolded that evening when he was murdered?
Well, I think one has to be really careful here because the main two characters were both narcissists, Yusupov and Perushkovich.
Perushkovich was proud.
Yusupov's account.
One has to be very, very careful about, because he didn't write until quite a long time later.
And of course, it was to make himself look good and so forth.
Purushka had sort of similar problems, but because his was written very, very soon afterwards it is more reliable.
One can see where he's exaggerating and so forth.
But basically I think one has got a pretty clear idea of the way on that particular night of December, the 16th 1916.
They assembled in the Moika Palace and then one of them dressed up.
In fact he was a doctor who worked with Perushkovich, dressed up as a chauffeur in sort of fur coats, because of course the cars were open in those days went off with Prince Yusupov to collect Rasputin from his apartment.
Brought him back.
And then they had this sort of supposed party going on upstairs while they said, oh well, we're going to have the real party downstairs, because he just created a sort of within this palace, his own sort of little apartment in more or less in almost in the basement.
Rasputin started obviously to get slightly suspicious because you know he had been promised that he was going to see the Grand Duchess Serena.
But there was no sign of her.
In fact, she was actually still in the Crimea.
She hadn't even come to Petrograd.
And that was all a complete lie on their part.
And Yusupov gave him some of these sweet cakes and other things, which was rather stupid.
They should have realized, actually, that Rasputin didn't like sweet things.
The only sweet thing he really liked was Madeira wine.
But they poisoned that, too, apparently, with pussic acid.
Anyway, he didn't seem to make any show of being affected by the poison.
So this is when they started to panic.
I mean, I describe it as Russian farce.
I mean, it really was one of the most incompetent assassinations I think ever, ever, ever planned.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.
And eventually this is why they suddenly realized they had to shoot him.
And the whole point of actually poisoning him was because there was a police station right next door to the palace and they were going to bound to hear the shots.
And in the end, they didn't even manage to shoot him properly.
The poison didn't work, probably because it was actually too old or because the sugar apparently affects and reduces desperately the effects of the cyanide.
So if that didn't work, they then put one bullet in him or whatever.
Thought they'd killed him, left him for a moment.
And then when they went back, they found that he was actually trying to escape.
And Perushkovich had his old American pistol with him or whatever and grabbed that.
And sort of finally, I think he brought him down with one shot and then blasted him at close range.
But I think all of that was more or less confirmed finally in the autopsy.
I mean, they did stupid things also, like sort of shooting one of the wolfhounds, one of the bonsais of Yusupov says, to sort of justify blood in the snow outside.
Well, you can imagine, by that time the local police had sort of turned up.
They then sort of said well, actually you know, you should be very proud, we managed to kill Rasputin.
And then they tried to deny that, even though they told the policeman, they then tried to deny that it had anything to do with it afterwards.
I mean, it was, as I say, unbelievably incompetent.
But he was dead.
That was the vital thing.
Do we know much about how Nicholas and Alexander received the news?
It's fascinating because we have the letters.
And they were all written in English between the Tsar and his wife, because she'd been brought up by Queen Victoria almost as sort of more English than a Hessian, which was her real family.
But she is actually writing to him and then breaks off because at that particular moment her great friend, Anya Virobova comes in basically saying sort of Rasputin never came back last night and all the rest of it.
But then suddenly she remembers that Rasputin had said to Virobova he was going to see the Grand Duchess Irena, and the emperor knew that she was actually down in the Crimea.
So she realized that something was wrong.
They then began to worry whether this was actually a coup d'etat, not just against Rasputin, but against them too.
And so they kept the whole sort of family there within the Alexander Palace.
And she immediately sent a telegram to the Tsar at the Stavka headquarters saying you've got to come back immediately.
And one has no idea exactly what his reaction was.
Because in his diaries he writes a certain amount about his daily events and certain people that he meets.
But in this particular case, we get very little about his real feelings about Rasputin.
Now some people say that he might have been slightly relieved that finally, Rasputin was no longer going to be around because it was sending his wife crazy.
And I think he must have started to realize that.
By then other members of the family had been telling him you are going to lose your throne if you don't sort of get rid of Rasputin and start appointing proper ministers and not ones who've been chosen by your wife.
And she herself had heard rumors that she was going to be locked up in a monastery if there was any chance and that the Tsar would be deposed.
And she was afraid that either Dmitry Pavlovich or the former commander-in-chief Nikolasha, the Grand Duke Nicholas, married to the Montenegrin princess, would be appointed czar in her husband's place.
I mean, there would be a complete palace revolution.
So there was tremendous fear. and anger and bitterness.
And I mean Yusupov, of course made things worse by then, writing a letter trying to say that he hadn't killed Rasputin.
But by then the police had already established pretty clearly what had happened.
So there was confusion, and then the Tsar was then obviously furious and embarrassed that his own family had been involved in the assassination.
I mean, Russians got used to having Grand Dukes being blown up by revolutionaries.
But the idea that an ordinary peasant was then murdered by a grand duke and a prince of course turns everything upside down in a way.
And it certainly did not appeal, shall we say, to the poor in the same way that many of the conspirators thought.
They thought that everybody would sort of welcome this as total liberation.
In Petersburg itself, in Petrograd, there was rejoicing.
I mean, everybody is suddenly in theaters were interrupted.
The players were interrupted.
People shouting out, have you heard Rasputin is dead or whatever?
And everybody would stand up and sing the national anthem and sing God Save the Tsar.
So, I mean, all of these paradoxes were going on.
Here we have Monarchus killing Rasputin and actually probably contributing to the downfall and the acceleration still further on what Rasputin had achieved in bringing down the whole Romanov autocracy.
By the end of your book, Rasputin appears less like an anomaly and more like a symptom of a failing system.
What do you think this story ultimately tells us about power, truth and leadership, especially in societies under extreme strain?
I think that the extreme strain was going to come about anyway, simply because when you have a reactionary society forced into a war for which it was ill-prepared ill-trained, its armies had all been there for parade ground spectacular at Krasnoyarsk, that the shock was going to be appalling.
And of course, the shock was appalling.
I mean the Austrians.
The whole idea actually was of course they weren't supposed to be fighting the Germans.
But because of the way that Germany had supported Austria.
Then they found that, in fact, their mobilization plans had to bring in Germany.
And that was why it became not just a minor European war, but just a major European war and world war.
And not only were they unfit really to deal with that in terms of organization, in terms of logistics, in terms of everything military.
In that particular way, the society itself was already corrupted by other elements.
As I say, that sort of fantasy act, those attitudes of carelessness also, I think, a love of rather conspicuous immorality.
I mean, there was something which so profoundly shocked the empress that people should wear the clothes they did the incredibly low-cut clothes of the women as far as she was concerned.
The love affairs in all directions that every single grand duke was expected to have mistresses and many of them divorced.
I mean, the divorce rate amongst the Romanov family was simply staggering.
I mean in England people were shocked by the one divorce or something like that in Edwardian times.
But I mean, here it was a question of sort of you know, the mistresses move in as the wives move out, or the wives then move in with actually yet another Grand Duke.
This, in fact, was something which played up and was played to during this period.
And as even not socialists.
But you could imagine who could make as much hay as they could if they could actually publish anything at that particular stage.
But even the reactionaries were shocked by the behavior of not just the aristocracy, but also of the great industrialists and the great merchants of that particular era.
Some of them were great men and created wonderful collections of paintings, which are the Tretyakov and others which one can see today.
And thank goodness they did, because they were great patrons of the arts.
But many, in fact, were involved in this massive corruption.
Child prostitution in the hotels, even in the grand hotels.
There was not much to admire about Petersburg society at that time.
That was best-selling historian Anthony Beaver speaking to Danny Bird.
A former chairman of the Society of Authors.
Anthony is a visiting professor at the University of Kent and an honorary fellow of King's College London.
