Posted on 06/21/2017 12:22:43 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Theories around the death of Grigori Rasputin still abound 100 years after the event. We examine the scientific credibility of some of the claims.
The end of December 2016 marked the 100th anniversary of the death of Rasputin, the “mad monk of Russia”, or “lover of the Russian queen” if you believe the Boney M song, though you probably shouldn’t. While the song is undoubtedly a floor-filler, unsurprisingly it is not exactly a reliable historical account of Rasputin’s life.
Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, a mystic and spiritual healer born in Pokrovskoe in Siberia, wielded huge influence over the Russian royal family, particularly Alexandra, the Tsarina, who looked to the spiritual healer to cure her haemophiliac son, Alexei. The life of Rasputin was certainly pretty strange but it is the stories surrounding his death that are the strangest of all.
What is known is that one evening Rasputin went to the Yusupov Palace in St Petersburg at the invitation of Prince Felix Yusupov. Rasputin’s dead body was recovered from the frozen Neva River days later. No one is completely sure what happened in between these two events.
The most well-known account of the events comes from Prince Yusupov himself in his memoirs Lost Splendour. This autobiography reads more like a boy’s own adventure story than a reliable historical document and many doubt the authenticity of what he wrote. According to Yusupov, when Rasputin arrived at the palace he was taken down to the cellar where he was given cake and madeira wine. Upstairs, a gramophone played Yankee Doodle Dandy to fool the monk in to believing there was a party in full swing.
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
There is a male reproductive organ in a jar of formaldehyde in a Russian museum purported to be that of Rasputin. It gives some creedence to the saying, “hung like Russian race horse.”
It was Russians that did it!
That’s my hypothesis: demonic possession. He was so packed full of ‘em, so infested, they kept him going until well after he was biologically dead.
Oh, BTW: they say that a couple of days after Yusupov wrapped the Mad Monk’s corpse in weighted chains and threw him in the Neva, when his body was recovered, he was found to have squirmed out of, like, seven of the eight chains.
I’m just sayin’
Some people take a lotta killin’.
He would have fit right in for any 70s Metal band.
Rasputin also was probably a user of Amanita Muscaria
often found at the foot of birch trees on the taiga
and used by rural shamans, so his tolerance for alkaloids
may have been pretty high.
Not really. Putin’s grandfather was a cook for Lenin and Stalin. He was a committed and loyal communist, and either lucky or beloved enough not to have been purged.
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