How did Rasputin really die?

Rasputin, mystic and advisor to the Romanov family in Russia, was distrusted and seemingly immuned to death. How did Rasputin finally die? Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Skipson, joined today by surprise, prise, Josh Clark. Surprise, surprise.
How's it going. It's going. It's actually I don't know.

(00:23):
I'm feeling kind of chilly, Willie because I was reading
about this really freaky dicky guy from history and yeah,
Mad Monketon, Yeah, yeah, he's a pretty interesting character, isn't
he interesting? Doesn't even begin to describe him. I want
to tell let me tell everybody about him. Well, I
can to tell them a little bit too, Okay, I'll

(00:43):
ask you a question and then you answer. How about that?
Since I know all the answers, that will be fine.
You are a wise old stage. You're no Rasputin, though,
so let me tell you a little bit about where
am I old? He? Uh, okay, you're a wise sage.
So Rasputin was basically this guy who was born in
Siberia in the late nineteenth century. I don't know if

(01:03):
he was actually born with that really long beard or not,
or if he cultivated it over the years, but it
was his trademark, right, Actually, that really greasy hair and
apparently a terrible body odor. Those were the three things
that most people who met respute and remember about him.
The body odor, the beard, and the very greasy hair,

(01:24):
very greasy. Was very greasy hair. The hair beard and
very greasy hair. I had to take his shoe. I
say that there's a force, Well, there's plenty of others.
His hypnotic eyes, Yeah, he did have some pretty serious eyes.
I looked at a few pictures of him in our
colleague Christen Congress article, um, and I didn't see it.

(01:44):
I didn't get it. You know, I was not hypnotized,
although I do feel like really talking the guy up
all of a sudden, it's weird. Yeah, they were. They
were strangely hypnotic people. Sudden. He went on decades later
to influence Holland Oates private eyes. Did you know that?
I didn't know you serious? I was gonna say, I
haven't even seen Holland as in concert, and I didn't
know that. You got me there, Canada. Well, Well this guy, uh,

(02:08):
he didn't start out influencing Hall of that. It's all right.
You know, he kind of worked his way up. He
was a peasants. He worked his way down, really so
he started out by influencing the royal family of Russia.
But again he didn't start out there. He worked his
way up to that. He's a peasant in Siberia, and
he made a name for himself out there in the
rural areas as a basically a healer, kind of a

(02:32):
mystic healer um. And apparently he was pretty good at
it because he gained a reputation. He had some sort
of religious conversion. I think he was an ordinary, average guy, uh,
and then he went to kind of a pilgrimage to
a monastery. Didn't become a monk, but I guess after
he came back from that trip he was. He was
a changed man. And this is where things got a

(02:53):
little bit strange because the people here practiced a really
strange form of religious I don't even know what you
would call it, but it was flagellation. Essentially, they'd get
together for group flagellation, which means essentially they would beat
themselves stilly and then they would commence um to have orgies. Yeah,
the flagellation, self flagellation would with people into an orgiastic frenzy.

(03:17):
The killests were the Clissi, where it was the sect
and the killest worthy adherents, right, and the thought being
that in order to attain salvation you had to sin
and essentially push it out of you. You expressed it,
and others helped, Uh, if you will, they helped in
that expression that. This made a huge impact on Rescipue.

(03:40):
And one of the other things he was very much
known for it was that he was just a very
sexual being, to the point where he's often, you know,
called debaucherous. Uh. He was really into sex. Apparently he
was attributed with having sex with over a thousand women,
if not more in his lifetime, and from the accounts
that I've read, that sounds like a fairly accurate number. Right. Um,

(04:03):
So he carries this with him to St. Petersburg. I
don't know if you know this or not, but he
was actually visited by the Black Madonna of Kazan, who
appeared to rest Mutan and said, hey, um, you got
a lot going for you, buddy. You've got the greasy
hair at the beard, you're a sexy guy. Uh, take
take the show on the road to St. Petersburg. And

(04:24):
he did, and he shows up there and this is
when it really becomes history, right, this is when he
got welcomed into the inner circle of the Romanovs. And
at first he was sort of, you know, an accessory
to the court, but then he really started to exert
his influence because the Romanov's only son and only male heir, Alexis,

(04:46):
was hemophiliac and he was very ill, and so he
was able to somehow mysteriously heal him or at least
help the pain subside. And that's when Alexandra was just
utterly taken with him and her faith and resputants powers
were completely clenched. When a couple of years later, Alexis

(05:07):
fell off a horse and he began to start bleeding profusely,
and Resputin wasn't actually at the Romanov's home, but he
tell he telegraphed her. Is that a verb? I'm so
far removed. He sent her a telegraph essentially saying he's
gonna be okay, and you know what he was, he
was Apparently he sent a message saying that Alexis would

(05:29):
survive the night, and he did, so, you know, Zarina,
Alexandra's devotion to Resputant was just completely cemented. Then, uh,
And so he's into the inner circle. He's taken his
um his killist sex show to St. Petersburg. Apparently he
is whining and dining all the Russian women, including the

(05:52):
Zarina and her four daughters. I understand. So he's just
gaining more and more power, and as he is, the
referral nobility are just you know, getting more and more nervous, right,
because essentially he is able to completely like puppet master
the Zerina and to a certain extent, her husband tsars

(06:12):
are Nicholas because he wants to please his wife obviously,
and so the Prime Minister decides that he just needs
to take respute and out. Yeah, well this is this
is where my question comes from. Um. I understand that
there was a plot uh of Felix Yosipoff, who was
married into the royal family, married one of Nicholas's niece,

(06:33):
nieces Um, and he carried out this plot. He planned it,
hatched it to kill Resputing. That much we know is fact.
I mean, the guy wrote about it very much, confessed it,
and everybody knew. Um. The my question comes from how
Resputin died. As I understand he he died kind of hard,

(06:54):
uh and and it took all manner of death to
finally take him down. Is that fact or fix? That's fact?
And that was back in December nineteen six, and years
before there were other attempts on his life. The Prime
Minister attempted to have him killed and then mysteriously somehow
someone got worried of this and the Prime Minister himself

(07:16):
was killed. And some people think that Nicholas arranged that. Why,
I've heard so he survived at least one assassination at
him to yep, yep, that's tell me about the second one? Well, um,
a woman tried to take him out and shot him
in the stomach and he survived that. I'm actually surprised
that that didn't happen more often, Like I'm surprised it
wasn't like an average Tuesday for Respue. Well, the peasants

(07:39):
hated him because they saw that the royal family, you know,
they were already pretty wary of in the first place,
was being completely yanked around by this guy. One woman
from Petrograd I read this and I just kind of
fell in love with that. She wrote, how could so
pitiful a wretch through so vast a shadow? And that
was a question on everyone's minds, and people were really

(07:59):
mad at resputants power at dinner parties. Um, a well
known socialite, was known to have hung up signs around
her home saying no one will talk about Resputin. And
when his name was flashed in newspapers, apparently the sensors
wanted to control people's outrage, so they went through and
just threw ink all over it and it was actually

(08:19):
called caviare these big black blots that essentially took out
all of the information about Resputin. So yeah, but he's
very insulated by the people in power, oh very much so.
And when World War One really started gearing up, Nicholas
had to leave for the front lines to help out
with the army. So by default, and Alexandra was in power,
and because Resputin was pretty likely sleeping with her and

(08:40):
also controlled her mentally, uh, she allowed him to appoint
people and positions of power and they paid him off essentially.
So here he is making money, loving life, skipping all
these attempts of murder because he's able to somehow miraculously
heal after all these strange efforts. But then one night
in December, it's just too much. And this is when

(09:01):
the man you spoke of invites him ever for drinks
and pastries to gaze upon his beautiful wife. Poisoned drink
some pastries. That's the hitch. They were completely laced with poison.
But they didn't kill him. Well, you know, I read, uh,
I've read elsewhere that apparently resputant had refused the drinks

(09:23):
and pastries at first, and Yosipuff freaks out and he
leaves the room to find out what to do with
his cohorts comes back and resputants eating him anyway and
drinking him. So, yeah, but what happened with the poison?
I mean, it didn't work. It didn't work, And so
finally everyone's just their frustrated. They shoot him, really dead,

(09:45):
only not dead. Yeah, they leave the room. Wait wait, wait, wait,
I know it's gonna get really confusing. Let me let
me lay this out. You're saying that he ate poison pastry.
I think it was drank poison wine. There was no effect.
And now he shot He shout, what, He's not dead,
He's not dead. They come back to check on him

(10:05):
and they lean over and like, I can see this
happening in my mind, and it just gives me goose bumps.
All of a sudden his eyes fly open and they're
bright green, and so they're kind of panicked. And at
this point recipe and makes a run for it, and
so they catch him in the backyard. They shoot him
a couple more times, and they started beating him with

(10:26):
the club. Then they tie him in a sheet and
throw his body in a river. And it gets worse
because anyway voice is getting It gets the worse because
when they find him, his right arm is extended, presumably
he was making the line of the cross, but he
was all tied up. So somehow he wiggled himself free

(10:47):
and there was a hole in his forehead, so they
thought maybe that's what killed him. But when they did
the autopsy, they found that it wasn't that shot. They
killed him was probably hypothermia from the cold water. And
what's more, the medical saminar didn't find a single trace
of poison and raspute in his body. Okay, so poisoned,
shot in the back, shot again, shot in the head, clubbed, clubbed, drowned,

(11:12):
and he dies of hypothermia. Yeah, it wasn't that wild,
but again, like that's still kind of fishy, and the
annals of history and um, it's it's just such a
salacious story, and there were rumors that these men even
castrated him before they passed him into the river. Yeah,
and now you have a smile on your face. Castrating

(11:36):
he Apparently, the the castrated part made its way around
the world in underground auctions. That kind of thing finally
came came to light in the eighties. A British heiress
bought it, had it tested turned out to be a
sea cucumber. So that may have not happened. Actually, yeah, well,
who knows. But and then in late two thousands, I

(11:59):
keep saying, and then and then there's more, there's more
going on. Um. Apparently the British may have had something
to do with Recipute and murder and the plot to
kill him, because as things were heating up with Germany
and the Allied forces, they knew that if Russia could
somehow be distracted with Germany on one side of the country,
Germany wouldn't be bothering the Allied forces as much. So

(12:21):
they take out rescipue and to provoke controversy everywhere, and
no one knows it's the British. But that didn't really
pan out so much. People don't really believe those theories
they have pretty much pended on this fateful night in December.
But he did take it, did take all that to
kill him? You're saying it did? It absolutely did. It
was impressive, reciput and impressive. You can learn so much

(12:43):
more about him. There's there's beardfools more to read about
this man, and you can find out everything you need
to know and how to rescipue and really die on
how Stuff Works dot com