Rasputin: The Myths Around the Man Who Would Not Die

You know the rules of this story even if you have never opened a Russian history book: poison him and he laughs, shoot him and he rises, and only the frozen river finally takes him. It is a magnificent death. It is also, on the forensic record, mostly untrue — and the way it became gospel is more interesting than the murder.

Grigori Rasputin was a Siberian peasant from the village of Pokrovskoye, born in 1869, who remade himself as a wandering holy man and reached the imperial court around 1905. His hold on Nicholas and Alexandra rested on one thing: their son Alexei had hemophilia, the state secret of the dynasty, and the boy repeatedly seemed to improve when Rasputin prayed over him or even telegraphed advice — most famously during a near-fatal bleeding crisis at Spala in 1912.

The healing trick, possibly explained

No one has to invoke sorcery. Rasputin calmed a hysterical household, which mattered, since stress worsens bleeding episodes. One modern hypothesis notes that he reportedly waved doctors away, and the fashionable new drug of the era was aspirin — a blood thinner that would have made a hemophiliac worse; remove the physicians and you remove the aspirin. It is a hypothesis, not a verdict. Contemporaries preferred hypnosis, and rumors of his mesmeric stare did half his networking for him. Whatever the mechanism, the empress concluded he was sent by God, and Petrograd society concluded he ran the empire, and both beliefs proved lethal.

What the autopsy actually found

On the night of 29 to 30 December 1916, Prince Felix Yusupov, Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich and the politician Vladimir Purishkevich killed Rasputin at the Yusupov palace on the Moika. The immortal version — cyanide cakes eaten with no effect, wine, a bullet, a resurrection, a chase, more bullets, a beating, and death only by drowning under the ice — comes almost entirely from Yusupov's own memoirs, written years later by a killer with a legend to sell, and the details grew with each retelling. The autopsy by Professor Dmitri Kosorotov recorded three gunshot wounds, including a close-range shot to the forehead that no one survives, found no cyanide in the stomach, and gave no support to death by drowning. A quieter conspiracy of aristocrats shooting a bound man does not sing, so the other version won. Speculation that a British intelligence officer fired the head shot circulates to this day without proof.

The prophecy that arrived after the fact

Then there is the letter. Rasputin is said to have written that if he were killed by peasants the dynasty would prosper, but if boyars — nobles — spilled his blood, the Tsar's family would not survive two years. The Romanovs were shot in July 1918, nineteen months after his murder, which makes the letter either a genuine premonition or the best-timed forgery in Russian history. It surfaced through his secretary Aron Simanovich, whose memoirs historians handle with tongs, and most scholars file it as a retroactive prophecy. Still, it is the one piece of the legend that cannot be fully audited, and it bothers tidy-minded people more than they admit. Boney M settled the popular version in 1978, and no autopsy can compete with a disco chorus.

Our readers keep their own docket of premonitions and letters that came true too late, filed below and voted on. Step in and judge which ones deserve the benefit of the doubt.