CONSPIRACY: The Mad Monk Who Controlled the Romanovs

Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes

This episode explores the life and death of Grigori Rasputin, examining the vast discrepancy between the legendary 'mad monk' and the histor

Key takeaways

• Autopsy findings by Dmitry Kasarotov revealed no cyanide in Rasputin's system and no water in his lungs, contradicting the legend of his poisoning and drowning.
• Rasputin's influence over Empress Alexandra was driven by his perceived ability to alleviate the symptoms of Alexei's hemophilia.

Main topics

• Grigori Rasputin
• The Romanov Dynasty

Notable quotes

The thing that killed the mad monk of Russia was... drowning.

Conclusion

The episode serves as a powerful reminder of how political instability

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Hi everyone, it's Vanessa Richardson. Before today's episode, I want to tell you about another Crime House show, Murder True Crime Stories. Join Carter Roy every Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday as he explores history's most notorious murders like you've never heard before. Follow Murder True Crime Stories, available wherever you listen to podcasts. Speaker 2 (0:30) This is Crime House. Speaker 4 (0:36) Late on the night of December 16th, 1916, in a candlelit cellar beneath a palace in the Russian capital, a prince sat and watched a peasant eat cake. The prince was Felix Yusupov, one of the richest men in the world. The peasant was a Siberian man named Grigory Rasputin, and the little cakes on the plate in front of him were packed with cyanide. Yusupov had been told the dose could kill several grown men in minutes. But Rasputin just kept eating. He asked for wine and Yusupov poured him glass after glass, each one laced with the same poison. Rasputin drank them down, complained that his throat was scratchy, and asked the prince to sing him a song. Hours went by and the peasant was still alive. So eventually, Yusupov grabbed a revolver and shot Rasputin in the chest. The man crashed to the floor. Finally, it looked like it was over. Then Rasputin opened his eyes. According to Yusupov, the dead man jumped up, foaming at the mouth, and lunged for his throat. Yusupov tore himself loose and ran. Rasputin followed him out into the snow, on all fours, roaring his name. Out in the freezing courtyard, Yusupov's co-conspirators fired again and again until finally Rasputin dropped to the ground. They wrapped his body in cloth, brought it to the river, and shoved it in through a hole in the ice. Days later, they pulled him out to find that his lungs were full of water, which meant that after the poison, after the bullets, after everything, the thing that killed the mad monk of Russia was... drowning. That's the story people have been telling for more than a hundred years. The problem is, it might not even be true. Which leaves me wondering, was Rasputin a holy man, a con artist, a sorcerer who had power over life and death? Or was he something a lot more ordinary, a scapegoat for an empire that was grumbling? Speaker 4 (2:55) From UFO cults and mass suicides to secret CIA experiments, presidential assassinations, and murderous doctors, these aren't just theories, they're real stories that blur the line between fact and fiction. I'm Vanessa Richardson, and this is Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes, a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I'll explore the real people at the center of the world's most shocking events and nefarious organizations. And remember, these Monday episodes will also be on YouTube with full video. You can find them every Saturday. Just search for Crime House Studios and be sure to like and subscribe. These cases are wild, and I want to hear what you think. At the end of each episode, please leave a comment wherever you listen. Be sure to rate, review, and follow so we can continue building this community together. And if you want even more, subscribe to CrimeHouse Plus and get every episode of this show and the rest of the CrimeHouse lineup ad-free and early, plus at least two bonus episodes every month. To join, go to CrimeHousePlus.com, or if you listen on Apple Podcasts, tap Try Free at the top of the Conspiracy Theories, Cults and Crimes show page. Today, I'm digging into one of the strangest figures in modern history, Grigori Rasputin. And I'm going to do my best with the pronunciations, but I'm no expert, so if I get anything wrong, please let me know. I do read the comments. Rasputin was a poor peasant from the far side of Siberia who somehow ended up whispering in the ear of the most powerful family in Russia. To the Empress, he was a saint sent by God to save her dying son. To almost everyone else, he was a fraud, a sex maniac, a sorcerer, and a traitor who was steering the country off a cliff. For a century, he's been the face of everything that went wrong in the final days of Imperial Russia. But the deeper you dig, the more you realize that the famous version of Rasputin, the mad monk with the hypnotic eyes, was built piece by piece by the people who wanted him gone. So who was he really? And who needed him to be a monster? All that and more coming up. Speaker 4 (5:20) By the early 1900s, the Russian Empire stretched from Europe all the way to the Pacific. It was one of the largest territories the world had ever seen, and it was ruled by one man, Tsar Nicholas II. In theory, his word was absolute. But in practice, Nicholas was presiding over a country that was starting to come apart. Most of his people were poor peasants with almost nothing, while a tiny circle of nobles held nearly everything. Cities were filling up with angry factory workers, revolutionaries were passing around pamphlets and bombs, and at the top of that unstable world sat a royal court that had developed a strange obsession. In those final years, the Russian aristocracy was fascinated with the occult, seances, fortune tellers, faith healers, mystics of every kind. Wealthy, educated people would gather in beautiful drawing rooms to contact the dead and search for hidden spiritual truths. That was the world Grigori Rasputin was about to walk into. Speaker 4 (6:27) Rasputin was born around 1869 in a village called Pakrovskaye, way out in western Siberia, along a river surrounded by forest and mud. His family were peasants, a little better off than some of their neighbors, but still a world away from the marble and gold of the capital. As a young man, Grigory had a reputation as a bit of a troublemaker. He drank, he got into fights, he married a local woman named proscovia started having children and worked the land like everyone else around him then in his late 20s something changed rasputin left home and went on a religious pilgrimage to a monastery no one can say for sure what happened to him there but the man who came back was not the man who left he gave up meat He gave up alcohol, he prayed for hours, sang hymns, and talked about God with an intensity that unsettled the people who'd known him his whole life. Rasputin had become what Russians called a stranic, a holy wanderer. These were men who walked from village to village, from shrine to shrine, living off the kindness of strangers and offering prayers and blessings in return. They weren't priests. They held no official rank in the church. They were something older and stranger than that. A kind of freelance holy man, and ordinary Russians often treated them with enormous respect. As Rasputin wandered, people started to notice. He had a gift. When he prayed with someone, they felt something. When he spoke, he seemed to look right into their souls and know exactly what was wrong. And then there were the eyes. Nearly everyone who met Rasputin came away talking about his eyes. They were pale, piercing, and so intense that people said they felt pinned in place, unable to look away. Word spread quickly, and Rasputin picked up followers. At first, it was mostly local peasants who would gather to pray with him. But as his following grew, so did the whispers. Back in his home village, people started saying his prayer meetings weren't as holy as they looked. There were rumors that women were involved and that behind closed doors there was singing and swaying late into the night. But there was one particular piece of gossip that would follow Rasputin for the rest of his life, that he'd gotten mixed up with a secret sect called the Klisti. Speaker 4 (8:53) The Clisti were a banned underground religious group with a shocking reputation. According to the stories, they held ecstatic rituals in the dark, spinning and dancing themselves into a frenzy to get closer to God. Those rituals were said to end in wild sexual free-for-alls. It was exactly the kind of thing that could get a holy man branded as a heretic or worse. Rasputin denied it, but the accusation stuck, and it traveled with him when he left Siberia behind. Because by around 1904, Rasputin had set his sights on the capital, St. Petersburg. And the timing couldn't have been better. When Rasputin arrived in St. Petersburg, he found a city full of rich, bored, spiritually hungry aristocrats who were desperate to believe in something. A real live holy man from the wilds of Siberia with burning eyes and a direct line to God was exactly what they were looking for. Rasputin didn't change when he walked into these gilded drawing rooms. He was a rough peasant in a coarse belted shirt and heavy boots with a thick untrimmed beard and dirt under his fingernails. He ate with his hands, reaching into the dishes and passing food to elegant ladies with his greasy fingers. To the perfumed nobles around him, That was the whole appeal. Here was an authentic man of the soil, unpolished and unafraid, who seemed to carry God around with him in a way none of their tame court priests ever had. He got passed from drawing room to drawing room, dazzling the people he met. And his biggest break came through two sisters. Princesses Militsa and Anastasia were originally from the small kingdom of Montenegro and had married into the Russian aristocracy. The sisters were so deep into mysticism and the occult that people at court nicknamed them the Black Princesses. They collected holy men the way other nobles collected art, and they had the ear of the most important woman in the empire, the Tsar's wife, Empress Alexandra. Speaker 4 (10:58) A few years before Rasputin turned up, the sisters had brought the empress another holy man, a French mystic named Nizier-en-Telm Philippe. Philippe ran seances, claimed he could see the future, and told the royal couple he could even determine whether an unborn child would be a boy or a girl. He was eventually exposed as a fraud and pushed out of Russia around 1903. But the court's appetite for mystics didn't end with Philippe. And the Black princesses could give Rasputin something no one else could, a path straight to the empress. Alexandra was originally a German princess and a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria. She'd married Tsar Nicholas for love, which was actually unusual for a royal marriage, and she was intensely religious, having thrown herself completely into the Russian Orthodox faith of her new country. She and Nicholas had four daughters in a row. Olga, Tatyana, Maria, and Anastasia. And in a monarchy that expected a male heir, the pressure for a son was enormous. Then in 1904, it finally happened. Alexandra gave birth to a boy, Alexei, the long-awaited heir to the Russian throne. The whole empire celebrated, but almost immediately, his parents realized something was terribly wrong. Baby Alexei wouldn't stop bleeding. A small cut, a little bruise, and the bleeding would go on and on. It turned out Alexei had hemophilia, an inherited disorder that keeps the blood from clotting properly. It ran in Queen Victoria's family, and it had been passed down through Alexandra's side to her son. A minor injury that would heal in any other child could turn into a slow, agonizing, life-threatening event for Alexei. The future of the entire dynasty rested on this one fragile little boy. So Nicholas and Alexandra made a decision that shaped everything that came next. They kept Alexei's illness a state secret. The Russian people were never told that their future czar could die from a fall, which meant that when Alexandra started to panic about her son, she couldn't turn to the nation for sympathy. She could only turn to God and to the holy men who claimed to speak for him. Speaker 4 (13:18) Rasputin met the royal family for the first time in November of 1905. Nicholas even mentioned it in his diary, calling him