Rasputin: The Man Who Wouldn't Stop Dying
Category: Eccentric People 17th June 2026
Once you meet Grigori Rasputin in history, you never quite forget him: shaggy hair, smirk like a man who's read all the fine print on other people's souls, and the uncanny talent for making polite society sweat. He was an oddball mystic, sure, but the part that reads like a dirty joke from a nobleman is how the assassination went down in December 1916-if you believe the gossips who wrote it first.
Prince Felix Yusupov and a clutch of conspirators invited Rasputin to the Moika Palace, allegedly plied him with cakes and wine laced with cyanide, then discovered the cyanide had the manners of a polite waiter who never arrived. Accounts say Rasputin kept eating. So they shot him. Then they shot him again. Some versions add a wrestling match, a neck break, or a stab. The final flourish-because history loves theatrics-was that they bundled him into a greatcoat and threw him into the freezing Neva River.
Here is the daft, stubborn nugget you can't forget: the postmortem concluded the actual cause of death was drowning. The coroner reported water in Rasputin's lungs, meaning he was alive when he hit the river. Poison didn't do the trick. The bullets, if they happened the way rival memoirs insist, didn't finish him either. Whether that's cinematic exaggeration or grim fact, the autopsy made the official note that the river signed the death certificate.
I spent years chasing crumbs of scandal back when I did that sort of thing, and Rasputin's last night reads like a grotesque cocktail party where everyone had too much ambition and not enough tact. He was part mystic, part circus, and utterly inconvenient to certain aristocrats. That he might have gone to his grave by drowning after surviving poison and gunplay is exactly the kind of final line a city columnist would envy: messy, humiliating, and impossible to tidy into a neat moral. Russia lost a menace and the world gained one more story you can tell at any awkward dinner and watch the soup go cold.