Was Grigori Rasputin a visionary, a fraud, or a victim of history?
Antony Beevor searches for the truth about the great seducer of the Romanovs, the wild mystic who laid the ground for the Russian Revolution.
When Russia’s Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she ‘lived under the pressure of the prophecy’.
Rasputin had no official position. A barely literate moujhik from Siberia, he had no forces at his command. He was a devoted monarchist, not a revolutionary. And yet, through his uncanny seduction of the imperial household, he contributed more than any other individual to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world. ‘This man was unique’, observed one writer who knew him well. ‘Like a character out of a novel, he lived in legend, he died in legend, and his memory is cloaked in legend.’
In this extraordinary new work, Antony Beevor, master of narrative history on the grandest scale, sharpens his focus to pierce the fog of fantasy that has only grown denser over time.
“Totally fascinating, compelling and beautifully written. In its deep political and psychological understanding of Rasputin, the Romanovs and Russia itself, it’s intriguing and original. One of the great stories of history, told by one of our greatest historians” Simon Sebag Montefiore.
Antony Beevor is the author of thirteen works of non-fiction, including Crete (1991), which was awarded a Runciman Prize; Stalingrad (1998), which won the first Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson Prize for History and the Hawthornden Prize for Literature; and D-Day (2009), which received the Prix Henry Malherbe in France and the Westminster Medal, and was a no. 1 bestseller in seven countries.
