Rasputin’s life is full of coaches and mystical episodes. He was born in 1869 in Prokrovskoe, a village in Siberia. He was the 5th son of a modest peasant. He did not attend school.
At the age of 23, he left the village, his parents, his wife and children to spend several months in an Orthodox monastery in Verchotur'e where he became a monk and devoted himself to religious life and learned to read and write.
I gathered around him a group of faithful who soon began to ask for miracles and prodigious interventions. However, various detractors claimed that he belonged to the Chlysty sect that practiced orgies and self-flagellations.
In 1902 Rasputin went to the city of Kazan, an important religious center, where he impressed the religious dignitaries who recommended him to the church leaders in Saint Petersburg where he arrived in 1903.
In Saint Petersburg the monk met Princess Milica of Montenegro and her sister Anastasia married members of the Romanov family and great spiritualists. It was the two princesses who introduced Rasputin to the court and introduced him to the tsar, Nicholas II, and his wife Alexandra.
In 1904, after four daughters, the Tsarina gave birth to a son, Alexei, who soon found herself suffering from hemophilia, a hereditary disease characterized by abundant internal and external bleeding. The bond between Rasputin and the sovereigns was consolidated when in 1907 the child had a serious hemorrhage that stopped when Rasputin imposed his hands and prayed.
The Empress saw in Rasputin not only Alexei’s savior but also a holy man, the only one she and her husband could trust blindly. In 1915, during the war, Tsar Nicholas assumed command of the army and left for the front, leaving matters of state in Alexandra’s hands. The Tsarina and Rasputin ruled the country in fact.
All this annoyed the nobility of the court who thus prepared a conspiracy. Feliks Jusupov, a homosexual aristocrat married to a niece of the tsar. He asked the monk to help suppress his impulses, and on the evening of 16 December 1916 he invited him to dinner in his palace.
At the dinner there were many, all inclined to eliminate the monk. So they were offered teas and pastries filled with cyanide, but Rasputin after hours gave no signs of poisoning, so he was offered poisoned wine too, but death did not come. At that point Jusupov shot him in the chest. Still alive Rasputin tried to escape. It took six shots before he died. The conspirators then dumped the body in the Neva River.
コメント