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Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs
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About This Book
When Russia's Dowager Empress was pregnant with the future Tsar, she dreamed that a peasant would one day kill her son. The idea terrified her, and for the rest of her days she 'lived under the pressure of the prophecy'.Rasputin had no official position. A barely literate moujhik from Siberia, he had no forces at his command. He was a devoted monarchist, not a revolutionary. And yet, through his uncanny seduction of the imperial household, he contributed more than any other individual to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world. 'This man was unique', observed one writer. 'Like a character out of a novel, he lived in legend, he died in legend, and his memory is cloaked in legend.' In this extraordinary new work, Antony Beevor, master of narrative history on the grandest scale, sharpens his focus to pierce the fog of fantasy that has only grown denser over time. The result is an unparalleled portrait of one of history's most dubious masterminds.
Reviews
"This isn't a conventional biography ..."
"This crisply narrated account focuses on how the rumours and conspiracy theories that swirled around Rasputin during the last years of the Russian Empire destroyed the Romanov autocracy."
"A crisp narrative ..."
"An exceptionally well-sourced, morally serious and often darkly comic account."
"It is hard to find anything new to say about Rasputin, but this story of credulous, out-of-touch monarchs steering their country into disaster never loses its sinister appeal."
"Beevor is a distinguished historian of 20th-century crisis, and what he relates here has been solidly documented archivally with the help of the Russian scholar Lyuba Vinogradova."
"Beevor relies on these reports, as well as other testimonies and memoirs, to create a catalog of drunken debauchery and mayhem ascribed to the mad monk."
"Beevor persuasively argues that many—but not all—of the most salacious stories about Rasputin were exaggerated or fabricated, but the corruption which seemed to follow in his wake was very real ..."
"An arresting portrait of a regime rotting from the top"
"Rasputin is a meditation on history as well as a masterclass in smooth, judicious prose."
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