A century ago today, the infamous mystic Grigory Rasputin was murdered by a group of noblemen in Petrograd, Russia’s pre-revolutionary capital. Ostensibly they were deeply concerned about the influence he was having over the Tsar and Tsarina and the assassination was their attempt to save the deeply unpopular monarchy. In part no doubt due to the grisliness of his demise, Rasputin is still one of the most familiar names in Russian history, outside of Russia anyway. So, I’ve decided to cobble together a hotchpotch of Rasputin-related material that should hopefully at least partially slake any curiosity you might have on the subject.
First up, there’s an episode of BBC’s Great Lives which sees comedian and self-declared Rasputin obsessive (he once made the so-called 'mad monk' his specialist subject on UK gameshow MasterMind and has subsequently written a play about him) Richard Herring nominate Rasputin as having led a great life, while academic Robert Service acts as expert witness. They, along with host Matthew Parris, have an entertaining if slightly meandering discussion of Rasputin’s life and times, turning up a wealth of interesting factoids along the way. Arguably the programme's biggest selling point is its inclusion of excerpts of interviews with people who had actually met Rasputin.
For a more linear (and much more detailed) treatment, there’s Dan Carlin’s retelling of the Rasputin story within the larger context of the Tsarist regime’s collapse almost an hour and twenty minutes into episode five of his series on World War I, Blueprint for Armageddon. With regard to Rasputin's assassination itself, Carlin gives you the legendary version of events with gusto, before bringing in a more sceptical analysis of what might have happened and why.
If you’re really, really keen you could always search out the 1996 HBO TV film starring the much-mourned Alan Rickman. Disappointingly, it’s not his best work by a long shot. A lot of the problem is that he’s just being a bit too stereotypically Alan Rickman-y to really convince in the part. He’s not helped in this by the script, which has him uttering as his first line, ‘And I’ve heard you're an imbecile’. It’s as if the writer and director rewatched ‘Prince of Thieves’ and just told him to go full Sheriff of Nottingham again, just with a Russian accent thrown in this time. The film as a whole is a bit of a mess. On the one hand there’s considerable attention to detail; for example, where lazy writing would have the bearded one getting plastered on vodka, in keeping with the facts, Rickman’s Rasputin’s tipple of choice is Madeira. On the other, some of it is spectacularly ill-judged. The film opens with Tsarevich Alexei addressing us from beyond the grave as then-present-day Russian forensic scientists exhume the remains of the Russian royal family. It doesn’t get much worse than that, to be fair, but the final scene depicting the murder of the Russian royal family does come uncomfortably close to resembling a sequence from an 80s action film. It’s not all bad; Ian McKellen is predictably excellent as Nicholas II. In fact, his portrayal is so sympathetic that it’s problematic as it rather obscures the general consensus that the real last tsar was something of a liability.
So there you are, two things to check out, another probably best avoided. Speaking of which, here's a link to the song I referenced in the title to this post. Disclaimer: once heard, cannot be un-heard. You have been warned.
....Just when you thought this post was finished – it shudders terrifyingly back into life! (Yes, I have some nerve making that joke after criticising the Rasputin film for being in poor taste)…but speaking of cinematic Rasputins, it transpires that there’s a 1960s Hammer Horror version with Christopher Lee. Apparently it is also less than great.
