Rasputin: The Real Man and the Cartoon Character


"Rasputin, Rasputin, Rasputin". In 1916, one name pounded like surf on a crumbling shore, in the food lines, salons, rooming houses--universally. "It was like a refrain," a Petrograd lady wrote. "It became a dusk enveloping all our world, eclipsing the sun. How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow? It was inexplicable, maddening, almost incredible." Here is:
Rasputin, the Cartoon CharacterRasputin, the Real Person
The Real Man was made into a Cartoon Character for the Movie "Anastasia". History still debates whether he was an evil sorcerer or the actual ruler of Russia prior to being assassinated in 1916.

"Frantic debauchery--he liked the word frantic enough to be using it as a nickname for a young woman he was trying to seduce--had turned Rasputin's sturdy frame "gaunt and cadaverous." The increasing malevolence of the anecdotes circulating about him kept his bodyguards on edge in December. He was said to be fucking the tsar's beautiful daughters as well as the tsar's wife. His underpants flew over the royal palaces in place of the double-headed imperial eagle. At night he drove in a black car across the Palace Bridge and fired shots at random, killing and wounding for pleasure; he was the first drive-by killer.

"He was at risk himself, and he knew it. "Do you know that I shall soon die in terrible pain?" he said, or so the French ambassador reported. "But what can I do? God has sent me to save our dear sovereign and Holy Russia. Despite my terrible sins I am a Christ in miniature."


The above is a quotation from "Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned" by Brian Moynahan, Random House 1997.

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