Review: The Biography, Rasputin, The Untold Story: The Life and Death of the Peasant Who Brought Down the Romanovs…

Controversial people are the most interesting. Yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that good people are dismissed, evil people are dull, or that everyone else is instantly forgettable. It’s just that controversial people make waves. Said waves radiate. In all directions. 

Some of these waves still radiate today. In the same directions. 

Rasputin, The Untold Story: The Life and Death of the Peasant Who Brought Down the Romanovs, by Joseph T. Fuhrmann, relays the life of a most controversial historical figure, Grigori Rasputin. He was hated but influential, simple yet complex, demonized yet deified. Some claim he brought about the end of Imperial Russia; some say he was a miracle worker; some contend that he was a meddling opportunist. But he left his mark, all right. And the world witnessed it.

Drawing on newly accessible Soviet archives and personal documents, Fuhrmann challenges the sensational mythology surrounding Rasputin, showing how rumor, political hostility, and scandal transformed a Siberian peasant into a symbol of the Romanov dynasty’s decline. His rise to extraordinary influence at court reveals the monarchy’s growing isolation and vulnerability, while his 1916 assassination reflects the political turmoil consuming imperial Russia on the eve of revolution. He was neither formally educated nor ordained, yet his persona as a Man of God emerged and was instantly believed by Nicholas Romanov II and his wife, Alexandra Feodorovna.

A recurring theme illustrated throughout the biography, political decay was rampant in Imperial Russia near the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th Centuries. It reveals how an increasingly isolated autocracy collapsed under the combined weight of dysfunction within the Romanov court, political incompetence, and mounting public scandal. Alexei Romanov, Nicholas II’s son, suffered from hemophilia, untreatable at the time, which his parents worked hard to keep secret. Through the imperial court’s inner circle, Rasputin was brought in to “treat” the boy. His prayers or mystical powers seemed successful; this miracle brought the peasant into the ruling couple’s confidence, especially Alexandra’s. 

Rasputin exploited his influence over the Tsarina to shape ministerial and church appointments, helping elevate loyal but often unqualified figures to positions of power. With Nicholas II commanding the army at the front during World War I, political leadership in Petrograd deteriorated into a revolving door of ministers, reinforcing perceptions that the monarchy was incompetent and dangerously detached from reality. Rumors of Rasputin’s sexual misconduct, corruption, and manipulation of the imperial family further discredited the regime, alienating aristocrats, military leaders, and ordinary Russians while turning him into a potent symbol of the Romanov monarchy’s broader decay. Rasputin soon became, in the public imagination, the embodiment of a corrupt and decaying regime, symbolizing the incompetence, scandal, and dysfunction surrounding the Romanov monarchy. As he became more influential and well-known, the schemes to assassinate him multiplied. Even conservative nobles came to see Rasputin’s assassination as necessary to save the monarchy, but his death came too late to restore public faith in the regime. 

Rasputin skillfully turned his reputation for mysticism into a source of power. His spiritual life began as that of an itinerant pilgrim, or strannik, shaped by a deeply personal search for God that valued direct religious experience over the formal authority and rituals of the Russian Orthodox Church. Severe illnesses and youthful crises convinced him that he had received divine visions, strengthening his independent spirituality and giving him the confidence to interpret scripture through his own raw, charismatic authority.

His mystical reputation became most consequential through his apparent ability to ease Tsarevich Alexei’s agonizing hemophilia attacks. To Nicholas II and Alexandra, Rasputin was not merely a political opportunist but a divinely sent holy man whose protection of their son became inseparable from their belief in the sacred destiny of the Romanov autocracy. Fuhrmann shows how Rasputin’s peasant background shaped his unconventional spirituality, including folk-religious ideas that grace could emerge through intense emotional and physical experience. Yet his enemies turned that same reputation against him, recasting the peasant healer as a symbol of spiritual corruption and political decay, and further weakening the Romanov monarchy on the eve of revolution.

Another important theme is the divide between the historical Rasputin and the mythic figure created by rumor, scandal, and sensationalism. Fuhrmann separates documented reality from the dark mysticism that came to define Rasputin’s legend. Public rumor transformed him into a demonic monk with hypnotic control over the Romanovs, when in reality he was a married Siberian peasant and religious wanderer whose influence rested largely on his apparent ability to ease Alexei’s hemophilia attacks. His enemies amplified stories of sexual scandal and political manipulation, turning Rasputin into a symbol of the autocracy’s moral collapse. By recasting a flawed but deeply religious peasant as a sinister sorcerer, public rumor and aristocratic hostility helped erode the monarchy’s sacred legitimacy. The myth became so powerful that leading nobles believed killing Rasputin might save the throne; instead, his assassination only further exposed Nicholas II’s political weakness shortly before the revolution.

Although Rasputin left no organized sect or formal religious movement after his 1916 death, his devoted inner circle preserved a lasting reverence for him and his spiritual legacy. In St. Petersburg, Rasputin attracted aristocrats and spiritual seekers, including Empress Alexandra, who regarded him as a holy man and miracle worker. After his assassination, the imperial family and loyal followers continued to revere him as a martyr, preserving personal relics and defending his reputation against charges of fraud and corruption. The 1917 Revolution and rise of the Soviet Union quickly suppressed open reverence for Rasputin, scattering his family and followers. Today, his legacy remains contested, though online communities and his museum in Pokrovskoye, Russia, preserve fascination with his extraordinary life and death.

My main takeaway from Fuhrmann’s biography is the grim continuity between imperial and Soviet Russia. I had originally assumed that Russia’s later repression, economic hardship, long food lines, and government corruption were mainly products of the Revolution and the Soviet system that followed. Yeah, no. I was so incorrect. Instead, the biography suggests that many of those problems had deep roots in the tsarist past. The Revolution overthrew the Romanovs, but it did not erase Russia’s long history of political repression, economic strain, or agricultural instability.

Under Nicholas II, the autocracy suppressed dissent through the Okhrana—the Imperial Secret Police—and resisted meaningful reform, treating challenges to imperial authority as threats to a divinely sanctioned order. The Bolsheviks destroyed that system, yet they preserved and intensified many of its authoritarian methods, replacing imperial repression with one-party rule, secret police, censorship, and the systematic elimination of political opposition.

The same continuity appears in Russia’s struggle to modernize. Before the Revolution, the empire remained largely agrarian and lagged behind industrial powers such as Britain and Germany. Afterward, Stalin pursued rapid industrialization through Five-Year Plans and forced collectivization, achieving modernization at an enormous human cost. In that sense, Fuhrmann’s biography shows that the fall of the Romanovs did not fully break Russia from its past. It replaced one repressive order with another, even as the language and ideology of power changed.

If you’re interested in controversial people, Rasputin: The Untold Story… is a must-read. I highly recommend it. But don’t forget about the good, evil, or normal people.