Rumour and the Fall of the Romanovs

A review of Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs by Antony Beevor; 384 pages; Weidenfeld & Nicolson (March 2026)

In the popular imagination, Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin was a sinister figure who faith-healed and hypnotised his way into Imperial Russia’s royal palace, where he was worshipped by Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra. But in this excellent biography, British military historian Sir Antony Beevor contends that Rasputin was a more complex figure than that:

One should not forget the saying of the great nineteenth century poet Feodor Tyutchev that Russia cannot be understood by the mind alone. Neither can Rasputin. He combined spiritual innocence and rampant lust; intense religious faith and cynical opportunism; boasting and paranoia; instinctive generosity and cupidity; self-knowledge and fantasy. He convinced himself that he genuinely loved women. Yet he sometimes resorted to rape. All the paradoxes of his character as well as the astonishing story of his life and death, defy conventional logic.

Beevor defends Rasputin in spite of his many flaws and argues that much of his sinister image was based on disposable rumours. Claims made during World War I that Rasputin was sexually involved with the empress and her children were “totally untrue,” he writes, but Russian newspapers ran this salacious gossip nonetheless (what Beevor pithily calls “the fake news of their day”). But rumour and conspiracy theories can produce their own historical effects, and they helped to make Rasputin a pivotal figure at a critical juncture in Russia’s history: “Seldom has the cause-and-effect chain of history been so influenced by a single man of humble origins and by wild rumours,” Beevor notes. “Rasputin’s importance provides an intriguingly different angle of the so-called great man of history theory.”

Beevor begins his study by looking at the story of Rasputin himself, an unremarkable peasant from Siberia who remained illiterate until he was thirty. His daughter believed that her father’s religious conversion occurred when he saw a vision of the Virgin Mary. Beevor, on the other hand, believes his subject’s spiritual transformation came about after losing three children in their infancy. He embarked on a pilgrimage to a monastery and was tutored there by a famous hermit called Makary, who was impressed by Rasputin’s “spiritual zeal” and urged him to learn to read and write.

Rasputin returned to his family a different man. He gave up smoking, eating meat, and drinking (at least for a while) and then embarked upon a pilgrimage across Siberia: “Rasputin did not want to be a priest and was far too restless to be a hermit or monk submitted to an imposed discipline.” By 1903, his reputation had grown and his audience was no longer simple farmers; he now spoke to the denizens of St. Petersburg’s salons. Two years later, he was introduced to Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra, at which point Beevor switches his narrative focus to Russia’s royal family.

It would be hard to find two figures better suited to Rasputin’s manipulations than this pair, especially Nicholas. According to Beevor, this son of a swashbuckling, autocratic father “lacked self-confidence which led to a disastrous mixture of obstinacy and indecision.” He was never “trained in statecraft,” but his religious tutor taught him “that the Tsar’s autocracy was sacred” and that “to reduce or tamper with it in any way was heresy.” As a result, Nicholas “rebuffed liberals and even moderate sympathisers of the Tsarist system” and pledged that “I will concentrate all my strength to maintain, for the good of the whole nation, the principles of absolute autocracy as firmly and strongly as did my lamented father.”

Contemporary observers believed that Nicholas’s personality was disastrous. “He is utterly incapable,” wrote Count Pavel Vassili, “of grasping the consequences of his own actions.” His German-born wife was decisive, and the tougher of the two, but her chief characteristic was religious zeal. Alexandra embraced Russian Orthodoxy “with the blind passion of a convert. Not for a moment did she question its beliefs and myths.” Much of Russia at the time shared this religiosity. Her friend Lili Dehn said of her homeland: “We are a race apart, our country is one of extreme mysticism and superstition. It is a land of miracles, where holy pictures are believed to shed tears.”

By now a popular figure among St. Petersburg society, Rasputin was introduced to the royal couple in late 1905 (an overexcited Nicholas recorded in his diary that he had met “a man of God”). They became convinced that he could help their ailing haemophilic son, Alexei Nikolaevich, and when Alexei suffered an internal haemorrhage in 1907, the couple summoned Rasputin. Rasputin prayed for their child and Alexei began to recover the following day, a development that seemed to offer a demonstration of Rasputin’s supernatural powers. Thereafter, he was an important member of the royal entourage. In 1912, Alexei developed a large haematoma in his thigh and groin after a rough carriage ride. Alexandra sent Rasputin a telegram (he was in Siberia at the time) asking him to pray for their son. “God has seen your tears and heard your prayers,” Rasputin replied. “Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him much.” Alexei’s bleeding stopped two days later.

As a result of incidents like these, the devout royal couple became protective of Rasputin and dismissive of the rumours circulating about his impious behaviour. Unsubstantiated whispers of orgies and possible visits to bathhouses with prostitutes were waved away on the assumption that Rasputin was self-evidently too god-like to behave in sinful ways. When the Russian press, newly liberalised by Nicholas with the 1905 October Manifesto, printed rumours that portrayed Rasputin and Alexandra as lovers and co-rulers, Alexandra was so incensed she wanted the papers to be shut down.

The most prophetic voice in Beevor’s book comes from an old academician named Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (1853–1920), who observed: “When a social and political order is about to disintegrate, rulers always seek the support of the supernatural.” And Russia, even before 1917, was a country in crisis. Three of Nicholas’s “direct ancestors were killed by the bombs or bullets of revolutionaries,” leading a German diplomat twenty years before Nicholas II’s reign to characterise the country as “absolutism tempered by assassination.”

The gap between rich and poor in 1905 St. Petersburg was considerable, and those who tried to close it, like the Tsar’s minister of finance Sergei Witte, were fired. Meanwhile, in dangerous factories with blast furnaces, workers enjoyed neither the right to strike nor the right to compensation for unfair dismissal or injury. Slum-dwellers slept in dosshouses and tenements. Squalor and disease were rampant, and epidemics of tuberculosis, venereal disease, cholera, and typhus were frequent. Child prostitution was not uncommon. “Revolution is banging on the door,” the Tsar’s cousin Grand Duke Konstantinovich warned.

Nicholas’s preferred response to this gathering danger was often repressive. Even the mildest of strikes was dealt with harshly by the government. In January 1905, Father Georgy Gapon, a priest and trade-union leader, led a peaceful march to the Winter Palace in order to present a petition asking the Tsar to protect workers from “the harsh regime of factory owners.” According to Beevor, “Gapon instructed the strikers to dress respectfully, bring no weapons, sing hymns rather than revolutionary songs, and carry icons not placards.” Nevertheless, the Tsarist regime believed this was an attempt to overthrow the monarchy, and the governor of St. Petersburg marshalled 12,000 troops. The infantry and cavalry were issued live ammunition and vodka, and when the army opened fire, 500 people were either killed or badly wounded.

Elsewhere, sailors aboard the Potemkin mutinied, and these mutinies spread to Odessa and Sebastopol. Peasants killed landlords and burned down manor houses while the rich dabbled in black magic and seances. Superstitious society women were quite taken with Rasputin and “volunteered to cut his fingernails so they could take clippings as sacred talismans to sew into their dresses.” Grand ladies competed to host him as their dinner guest.

Beevor provides a complex portrait of his subject. He tells us that Rasputin opposed Russia’s war with Japan in 1905 because he feared what it would do to the peasantry in the army. And while many of the Russian aristocrats were antisemitic, Beevor notes that Rasputin was not (this was one of the animating issues that turned Russia’s extreme Right against him). He failed to see that even his friends would desert him. Former admirer Sergei Trufanov came to see him as “a devil clothed in the garments of an angel.” Archimandrite Feofan was “the first of Rasputin’s supporters within the church to turn from him, following several accusations from women of sexual assault.”

Beevor can’t decide whether allegations like these were credible or not, although he does acknowledge that Rasputin obtained sexual favours from mothers in exchange for getting their sons pulled off the frontlines in World War I. But he rejects the notion that Rasputin molested the Tsar’s daughters. The accuser—the daughters’ governess, Sofia Tyltcheya—was plausibly motivated by indignation “prompting insinuations against Rasputin which she could not prove and may well have been pure supposition.” The Tsar defended Rasputin to the governess, saying, “[A]ll these difficult years I have survived because of his prayers.” Beevor believes the rumours of molestation and cuckoldry were “heavily embroidered within each retelling in the salons of St. Petersburg.” Rasputin’s habit of stroking females—which was the basis of the governess’s accusations—is defended by Beevor as evidence of “a compulsively tactile character with men as well as women” and that it was “not necessarily sexual in intent.”

The most damaging rumour related to suspicions that Rasputin was interfering in political decisions at court. This belief grew during World War I, when Nicholas foolishly took command of the army (on the advice of Rasputin and the Empress), leaving the government in their hands. Rasputin initially opposed Russian involvement in World War I because he correctly foresaw that it would end the Tsar’s rule. This only aroused further suspicion and hatred among those who suspected that the Empress and Rasputin were a “centre of treason” that was “undermining Russia’s war effort” while Nicholas was away.

Still, Rasputin’s belief that the peasant soldiers in the infantry would suffer was vindicated by events—the Russian artillery lacked shells, which left the infantry to “sustain enormous losses.” Whether or not Rasputin actually took any political decisions, the perception that he was doing so sealed his fate. The Russian extreme Right already hated him and blamed him for the bad progress of the war, so they began to contemplate and plot his assassination. The governor general in Crimea, Ivan Dumbadze, sent a telegram to the police asking them to “allow me to get rid of Rasputin.”

There was also, Beevor notes, a high turnover in senior appointments while the Empress was in charge with Rasputin as her chief advisor. Four different prime ministers came and went in 1916 alone. Rasputin’s enemies blamed him for that as well, although Beevor sees this as the Empress at work: “Her overriding priority was that each person should support her and Rasputin with unquestioning loyalty.” But Beevor also acknowledges evidence of political tampering by Rasputin: “Provincial appointments, many of which bore signs of Rasputin’s involvement, were even more haphazard. In 1915, thirty-three governors were changed and forty-three in 1916.”

Meanwhile, the price of food soared in the cities and industrial workers grew increasingly bitter. Rasputin’s royalist opponents thought the monarchy could be saved if Rasputin no longer influenced the Empress, so they hatched an assassination plot led by Russian Prince Felix Yusupov. On 30 December 1916, a group of nobles lured Rasputin to Yusupov’s home where they shot him. He was hit three times with the fatal shot striking him in the forehead. Beevor discounts the stories of Rasputin remaining unaffected as he consumed poisoned cakes and wine.

Beevor ends his book as he began it, with some remarks on the power of rumour that had served to sustain Rasputin’s influence and power, but which had also finally destroyed him. Eventually, these rumours would lead to the collapse of the entire Tsarist regime. “When it comes to Rasputin’s effects on the course of events,” he observes, “perception was far more powerful than reality.”