The plot was to murder Rasputin. The bait was to use Princess Irina – a demure 21-year-old niece of Tsar Nicholas II – as a “sexual lure”. The trap was the Moika Palace, the opulent home of one of the ...

Douglas Smith, the author of a substantial, meticulously researched and fluently written new life of Rasputin, calls it “possibly the most recognised name in Russian history”. Everyone knows the story ...

Grigory Rasputin has long occupied a peculiar corner of the historical imagination. In popular culture he appears as a kind of pantomime villain: a hypnotic monk with burning eyes, drunkenly ...

In December 1916, the infamous mystic, Grigori Rasputin, was murdered by Russian aristocrats. Rasputin, a Siberian peasant and wandering holy man, had become a powerful figure at the Russian Imperial ...

In “Rasputin,” the biographer Antony Beevor delves into the mysterious life of the last czarina’s mystic adviser. By Sophie Pinkham Sophie Pinkham is the author of “The Oak and the Larch: A Forest ...

In 1999, Antony Beevor published Stalingrad, his account of the nihilistic battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that was a pivotal event in the second World War. The story combined ...

Who is Rasputin? Find out how much of the story of the Mad Monk is myth and how much is history. The myth of Rasputin, the Mad Monk, is well-known: He was a scheming sexual predator who insinuated ...

On Dec. 17, 1916, which is Dec. 30 under the current calendar, “the streets of St. Petersburg had a celebratory air to them; elated passers-by hailed and greeted not just acquaintances but total ...

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The mystic peasant Rasputin was a trusted adviser of the Russian royal family but made deadly enemies. His violent 1916 assassination is the stuff of legend, leaving historians to piece together what ...