Rasputin Dark Servant Of Destiny

[Elisabet Schwartzkopf]

Born of peasant parents (his father was a former postman fired for alcoholism), he arrived in Saint Petersburg in the early 20th century, where he had some success in treating Tsarevich Alexei, who suffered from hemophilia. He managed to turn this, and the fascination in upper-class Russian circles with religious mysticism, healing, and sex, into becoming a close associate of Tsar Nicholas II's family and an important figure in pre-revolution Russia. Rasputin also was never an ordained cleric or monk of the Orthodox Church (and had quite a lot of enemies among them); his official status in Orthodox Christianity was that of a lay preacher. However, authors tend to forget that and call him a "mad monk".

When Tsarina Alexandra called upon him to pray for the healing of Tsarevich Alexei, he told Alexandra "God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much." Alexei's hemorrhage stopped the next day and he began to recover, something that even the doctor treating Alexei couldn't describe as anything but a miracle. Alexandra regarded Rasputin as a starets, a venerable religious elder figure with a direct connection to God, and would manifest Mama Bear-like instincts, fervently defending him and turning her wrath against anyone who dared to question "Father Grigoriy" after Alexei's miraculous healing. However, the famous song at the top of the page is incorrect. He debauched his way through St. Petersburg society with behavior that may have been illegal, but he was smart enough to keep all of that away from the Tsar's family; he was not the straitlaced and prudish Alexandra's lover, with no evidence that their relationship was anything other than one of religious fervor. None of that stopped gossip, of course, especially when Alexei's illness was only known by a handful of people.

Rasputin's disproportionate influence over the Tsarina, and through her the Tsar, was resented by many, not without reason, and he became a target of anti-Romanov and anti-Tsarist groups in Russia. He was murdered in 1916, ostensibly by Prince Felix Yusupov note otherwise known for being a flamboyant bisexual crossdresser, and being married to the Tsar's niece and a band of his cronies. Yusupov's story (as embroidered and added to through the years) was that Rasputin was lured to a meeting with Yusupov where he was fed cakes and wine laced with cyanide; when that failed to kill him, he was beaten, shot, stabbed, had his genitals chopped off and was thrown into the Neva River, where he died of hypothermia after trying to claw through the ice. In reality, he was shot four times. No cakes (he had a bad stomach and wouldn't have eaten them even if the cyanide could have survived the baking process), sipped a very small amount of wine, the first shots fired by Yusupov's trembling hand either missed or did not hit vital organs, no beating, no freezing. Though he may have reincarnated as Alan Moore.

As an aside, some have theorized that the British Secret Intelligence Service was involved in the plot to some degree. While Yusupov himself did not have any obvious connections to the organization, its director at the timenote Sir George Mansfield Smith-Cumming, aka "C" was a friend of a friend.note Bruce Lockhart, who frequently interacted with Yusupov in his capacity as Minister of Foreign Services The fact that he was pushing the Tsar to get Russia out of World War I certainly gave the British a reason to want him dead, as that would have freed up a significant portion of Germany's forces for a push against Allied lines in western Europe (it did happen eventually, when the Bolsheviks signed the Treaty of Brest Litovsk with Germany in March 1918, though by that time the Allies were ready for counter-offensives).

Trope Namer for Rasputinian Death. The frequent myths and interesting history around him has made him a frequent target for a Historical Villain Upgrade, Historical Domain Superperson or Beethoven Was an Alien Spy, as well as a prominent figure in many a conspiracy theory. His legacy is also subject to Pop Culture Osmosis where he is reimagined as a villain who sought the downfall of the Romanovs (with Anastasia usually being the protagonist of these stories).

No relation to the current Russian President, Vladimir Putin (though Putin's grandfather very likely cooked food for him). Their surnames are actually antonymous in Russian, with Putin meaning "of the path" while Rasputin stands for "off the path" or, figuratively, "the libertine".

He is also (indirectly) the reason why nearly all films end with "This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental." in the credits. His assassin, Felix Yusupov, was exiled for his actions (ironically sparing him the fate of the other Russian royals who were killed during the revolution) but ended up destitute in Paris. In 1933, MGM produced the Rasputin biopic Rasputin And The Empress (starring John, Ethel, and Lionel Barrymore) which Yusupov claimed to be defamatory. Not toward himself, though, because he openly bragged about being the assassin. Rather, it was defamatory towards his wife, Irina. They were awarded the equivalent of about $125,000 in today's money, the film was pulled from circulation for decades, and almost every other movie since has included that disclaimer to avoid similar issues.

Fan Works

• His equivalent in the Discworld is Gaz Putin, a scheming wizard who died boasting that he managed to seed the mighty Romanoff family with a streak of magic that they'll never be able to remove. Read more in the works of A.A. Pessimal.

Literature

• In The Devil Rides Out, the Duc refers to Rasputin as the greatest dark magician of his age, who unleashed the four horsemen of the apocalypse and almost caused armageddon - i.e. the First World War.
• The Doctor Who Past Doctor Adventures novel Wages of Sin is set in pre-Revolution Russia and has Rasputin as a character. It's a historically-straight portrayal mostly, although his famous hard-to-kill-ness does turn out to be due to a time traveller trying to keep him alive.
• He gets far more hilarious in Faction Paradox. To start with, the Faction recruited him a few days before his death, took him to the Eleven-Day Empire, and replaced him with an exact duplicate. Then the Celestis came along, didn't realise the Faction had made the switch, and offered him their standard deal that includes resurrection. The duplicate had been briefed not to argue with any War-era powers it met, and so accepted the deal. By the time of the assassination attempt, the Great Houses noticed something was going on, assumed the Faction would try to take him to the Empire at the point of death, and so implanted a device that would replace the Faction duplicate with a Great House duplicate. House constructs are by default immune to poisoning. As such, when the poison failed, he was shot. Then the Celesti protocols resurrected him, producing a creature whose mind was struggling between Great Houses, Celesti, and Faction protocols which had to be shot repeatedly and beaten to death simply to get it to lie down long enough to be thrown ino the river, where it finally froze to death. As a result, none of the three powers involved like to talk about it and everyone in the War agreed to leave celebrities well alone. The real Rasputin, meanwhile, persuaded Anastasia (who was also a Faction recruit) to set up a rival state, then went mad and died under mysterious circumstances. Anastasia's Thirteen-Day Republic was shortly afterwards annihilated.
• Heretical Edge casts Rasputin as an Akharu who somehow managed to cast magic despite the blood curse that's supposed to prevent that; this enabled him to both perform his miraculous healings and fake his death. He was subsequently possessed and forced to betray the Romanovs, but he nonetheless managed to save Anastasia by turning her into a vampire. Unfortunately, she doesn't know about the possession and is hunting him down for revenge.
• A Cahill from the Tomas branch in The 39 Clues.
• A Night in the Lonesome October has Rastov the Mad Monk.
• The Last American Vampire has protagonist Henry, along with Nikola Tesla, involved in killing off Rasputin, who was just a bit much for humans to handle, being a vampire himself.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians/The Heroes of Olympus: The Manual suggests that he's a son of Hades. Considering that the children of Hades we meet in story tend to be dark (if not necessarily evil), brooding, and somehow subtly wrong, it checks out (for the record, his half-siblings include a voodoo queen's kid who constantly summons cursed jewels, a kid whose only friends are the dead, and Hitler).
• One chapter of Julius Evolas "Eros and the mysteries of love" is almost entirely dedicated to Rasputin and his sex life.
• The Onion book Our Dumb Century features an article from 1923 called "Russians Continuing to Kill Rasputin." It's Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Live-Action TV

• He was the subject of an episode of The Crow: Stairway to Heaven.
• Leonard Nimoy played a Rasputin-like character in "The Choice", an episode of Mission: Impossible, indestructibility and all.
• Played by Alan Rickman in HBO's 1996 biopic Rasputin, aka Rasputin Dark Servant Of Destiny. His portrayal argued Rasputin may actually have been a saint with legitimate supernatural powers derived from God and at the very least didn't deserve the crap piled on his memory.
• When the topic of Rasputin's death was brought up on QI, Bill Bailey, inspired by the Boney M song's line about Rasputin's glowing eyes, put forth the theory that Rasputin was, in fact, a Terminator. Complete with him dragging himself along the panel like the end of the first film.
• Rasputin shows up among the army of wax droids in an episode of Red Dwarf, serving mainly as Emperor Caligula's lackey.
• Forever Knight. Rasputin is a vampire who gets executed on the orders of LaCroix the vampire so as to spark off the chaos of revolution.
• In the Angel episode "Why We Fight", after Angel tells the vampire Nostroyev he's never heard of him, Nostroyev lists various atrocities he's responsible for, closing with "I was Rasputin's lover!"
• Meanwhile, over in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, during a history lecture on the circumstance surrounding Rasputin's death, Buffy wonders out loud whether he was actually a vampire. The professor giving the lecture is not amused.
• Grimm: Aunt Marie's records indicate that Rasputin was the same kind of being as Koschei the Deathless, thus explaining how hard he was to kill and his supposed magic powers. No indication is given on whether he was evil, but the Koschei that the protagonists meet certainly isn't.
• Legends of Tomorrow: In the Season 5 premiere, Rasputin is the first of the Encores resurrected from Hell by Astra in order to sow chaos across history. He bursts out of his coffin during his funeral, and immediately sets about planning to assassinate the whole royal family so that he can take over Russia. The Legends try to stop him, but the Resurrective Immortality provided by having his soul chip still in Hell impedes them, until finally Ray shrinks down to enter his mouth and grow to full size again, bursting his body apart; the Legends keep the remains in multiple jars to keep him from regenerating from that.
• In the Doctor Who episode "The Power of the Doctor", the Master appears using Rasputin's identity, although it isn't clear whether the Master always was Rasputin, or was temporarily impersonating him (The script on the BBC website stated that he is Rasputin because there's a deleted scene where he gets thrown into a bag by a Prince who historically did that.). To cap it off, the Master even dances to Boney M.'s "Rasputin" while carrying out his Evil Plan.

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