I really think Rasputin lucked out, in that being remembered by history as some species of giant unkillable sex wizard is something most of us can only fruitlessly aspire to.
He didn’t luck out, he worked hard for that rep
he really didn’t though
he was just kind of a garden-variety creep, but the rumor mill did all the work for him and now he’s a banger disco song
to be fair, neither could Rasputin. Alexei very much continued to have haemophilia.
isn’t the current theory that he seemed to heal faster and have more spoons when Rasputin was around because Rasputin wouldn’t let the doctors give him aspirin, a blood thinner?
Ra Ra Rasputin Russia’s wellness scamming fiend
Fun fact: the conspirator who’d been made responsible for preparing the poison for Rasputin, Stanislaus de Lazovert, was a medical intern who’d studied under the exact same doctor who kept trying to treat Tsarevich Alexei’s hemophilia with aspirin.
Like, I feel like this should be taken into account when evaluating reports of Rasputin’s miraculous immunity to poison.
Did the guy who shot him also study under that doctor?
No, Felix Yusupov was just a useless nerd who thought he knew how murder worked because he’d read a book.
Based on the available historical evidence, the most likely sequence of events is as follows:
- The conspirators attempt to kill Rasputin with poison-laced cakes, but fail; it’s unknown whether this is because de Lazovert fucked up the poison, because Rasputin – who had a well-known dislike of sweets – didn’t go in on the cakes as heavily as they expected, or just because a poisoned cake is a really stupid idea.
- Seeing that the poison has failed, Yusupov gets Rasputin alone for a moment and shoots him once in the chest, causing him to fall senseless to the floor. Because he’s a useless nerd who thinks he knows how murder works because he read a book, Yusupov is unaware that a single handgun shot is very unlikely to be immediately fatal, and neglects to finish Rasputin off, instead leaving the room to confer with his fellow conspirators.
- When the conspirators return to retrieve Rasputin’s body, he recovers from the shock of the initial gunshot and attacks them. Following some general panic, a third conspirator, Vladimir Purishkevich, opens up guns blazing; Purishkevich manages to miss several times in spite of being at point-blank range, but eventually strikes Rasputin in the head, killing him instantly.
- The conspirators beat the shit out of Rasputin’s body just to be sure, then proceed to make a complete clownshow out of disposing of the corpse; the remainder of Rasputin’s injuries are sustained postmortem.
Pretty much everything else about Rasputin’s miraculous invincibility is invented whole cloth, much of it by Yusupov himself in order to build himself up in his own published memoirs.
(As icing on the incompetently poisoned cake, elements of Yusupov’s memoirs were later incorporated into the 1932 film Rasputin and the Empress, which led to Yusupov suing MGM Studios for libel because the film strongly implies that Rasputin was fucking Yusupov’s wife. The precedent set by that lawsuit is the reason those “similarities to any real person living or dead are coincidental” disclaimers exist.)
That last fact took me off at the knees.
Is no one going to mention that all of this (or at least the start of it with the cakes) happened while they were loudly playing “Yankee Doodle” on repeat in the background to try and cover the sound of their murder attempt from the people downstairs.