Mad monk who Rasputin it about... a lot
AND HE WAS LOVER OF RUSSIAN QUEEN!
★“RA, RA, Rasputin, lover of the Russian queen…!” All most of us know about the Russian playboy mystic, who met a grisly end 105 years ago this month, comes from Boney M’s hit 1978 pop song.
But now Grigori Rasputin is set to feature in new movie The King’s Man as an arch villain, played by Rhys Ifans.
★
A stellar cast includes Gemma Arterton. Yet the truth about the “mad monk” is even stranger than fiction, as JAMES MOORE reveals…
Born in 1869 to illiterate
1
peasant farmers in Siberia, Rasputin married local girl Praskovya Dubrovina at 18 and they had seven children.
But 10 years later, after a pilgrimage
2 to a monastery, the spooky 6ft 3in eccentric set himself up as an unofficial “holy man” who began preaching and claiming he could heal the sick.
In 1905 Rasputin befriended
3
Russian ruler Tsar Nicholas II and his wife Alexandra after appearing to stop the bleeding of their haemophiliac son and heir Alexei.
Rasputin – a nickname
4 meaning “debauched one” – was rumoured to have started an affair with Alexandra. It was even claimed he once drunkenly exposed himself and bragged about it.
Some historians think the
5
rumours were started by enemies of the Romanov royal family, but Rasputin was certainly a notorious womaniser. He seduced women by
6
claiming he could cure ailments with personal physical contact.
In 1914 Rasputin
7
survived an assassination bid after being stabbed in the stomach by a woman devoted to a rival mystic. The next year
8
Tsar Nicholas left to take personal
command of his struggling army in World War One. Rasputin began wielding influence over Alexandra, making powerful foes.
On December 30, 1916, he
9
was lured to St Petersburg’s Moika Palace where vengeful nobles lay in wait to kill him.
They fed him cakes laced
10
with cyanide, but this failed to have an effect. So they shot him three times instead.
Some say the 47-year-old
11
only died after a bullet to the head, others that even then he didn’t die but had to be drowned in the freezing River Neva, where his body was found the next day.
Before his death he wrote
12
letters appearing to predict his own killing and the execution of the royal family in 1918.
Bizarrely, it’s claimed his
13
daughter Maria later sold his pickled 11in penis to a Russian erotica museum.
With lyrics such as “Russia’s
14
greatest love machine,” Boney M’s Rasputin song went to No2 in the UK charts.
In a chilling coincidence,
15
band member Bobby Farrell also died on December 30 in St Petersburg. His death in 2010, at 61, from heart failure, came after performing at a gig in the city.