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Documentary, Rasputin-The Devil in The Flesh SWESUB Documentary
#Rasputin #Documentary #SWESUB #Devil
#Rasputin #Documentary #SWESUB #Devil
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00:00The eyes, lupine eyes, eyes that were able to bore into the centre of your soul.
00:13Rasputin was able to do something which physically altered people.
00:20We see again and again that he exercised this curious influence over the royal family,
00:25or rather over the Tsarina.
00:30He felt that he was being taken over by a higher force.
00:38The devil was something he was wrestling with inside his own mind,
00:42but found that it was overwhelming, that it was just too much.
00:46Grigory Rasputin was born here in Siberia, 10th of January, 1869.
01:04Its 4.5 million square miles make it one of the largest and most remote pieces of land in the world.
01:11For generations, Russians had been using it as a dumping ground for all kinds of religious exiles and prisoners.
01:19It was home to holy men, healers and secret religious sects.
01:25The first thing you need to think about with Siberia is this emptiness, this vast, isolated sort of space where there are very few people.
01:35Russians always viewed it as this kind of empty space that was there for them to fill up.
01:42They could never fill it, it was just too vast.
01:47They weren't very useful routes for travelling around the country and I think that this contributed to the isolation that Russian communities felt in this very hostile, very cold landscape.
02:02Rasputin would certainly have felt part of that very cold, very isolated, kind of embattled sort of Russian frontier, if you like, a sort of Wild West except of course the Wild East.
02:21Rasputin's origin in the town of Prokrovsky undoubtedly played a very large part in the shaping of his character.
02:30Not only is it the very fringes of civilisation where pagan shadows hang over everybody's lives, irrespective of the presence of official Christianity, it's also crushingly dull.
02:45So, the young Rasputin, being as he was, a lecher and drinker would have felt a very strong desire to be more than this, to break forth, to see something else.
03:00As a child, Rasputin began turning heads.
03:05His parents became disturbed by his constant visions of divine forces and by his ability to heal horses just by touching them.
03:13This was a time and a place that accepted magic and healing as a way of life, but many villagers were frightened of the child, convinced he had the devil in him.
03:23From fairly early on, I think he had a kind of reputation of peculiar person in his village.
03:30He certainly did have peculiar healing powers.
03:33He also just obviously had this ability to foresee the future, which stayed with him all his life.
03:40He'd just get sudden glimpses, I think, of things he absolutely knew to be true.
03:46By the age of 30, he'd married a local woman and had four children, but he'd also earned a reputation in the village as a drunken thief.
03:55He was accused of horse stealing and fled to the nearest monastery to lie low.
04:01His experience there was to change him forever.
04:08He spent several days at the monastery and suddenly realised, you know, that he was basically a monk by temperaments.
04:16In the monastery, I mean, his first contact with that ritualised form of religion, it must have been the opening of a door into a new world for him.
04:35And to Rasputin, that must have represented a dazzling promise, something he absolutely had to know more about, to get more involved with.
04:43Not only would it offer him the chance to entrench his own rather dissolute life in something deeper,
04:50it also opened the way to discovering new depths to reality.
04:56Rasputin stayed at the monastery for months and made friends with a man called Makari,
05:01a famous wandering holy man who had advised Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.
05:08For centuries, Russian rulers had believed that holy fools had access to God and could give divine advice to the Tsar.
05:16Rasputin decided immediately to follow in Makari's footsteps.
05:20Rasputin stayed at the monastery for months and made friends with a man called Makari,
05:23a famous wandering holy man who had advised Tsar Nicholas II and Empress Alexandra.
05:30For centuries, Russian rulers had believed that holy fools had access to God and could give divine advice to the Tsar.
05:48Rasputin decided immediately to follow in Makari's footsteps.
05:55Rasputin decided immediately to follow in Makari's footsteps.
05:57He does up and leave his wife and go wandering as a Stariats, a wanderer.
06:03He sees the opportunity to go and explore religion, to explore spirituality as his way of coping with that isolation.
06:16By travelling, moving on so that everything around you is transient, you become closer to that which is eternal.
06:23He would go on long walks, long pilgrimages between places, suffer the assaults of mosquitoes in marshy swamps,
06:30stand motionless for hours on end.
06:35For months, Rasputin didn't wash, change his clothes or touch his body with his hands,
06:41sometimes wearing iron shackles to increase the hardship.
06:46He certainly wandered way south to Greece, to Mount Athos,
06:51and he certainly went to Kazan in these wanderings which lasted for two or three years.
06:56To begin with, you know, he was starved a lot of the time.
07:02Secondly, the sheer physical hardship of walking around a place as big as Russia,
07:08where you couldn't thumb a lift, must also have been tremendous.
07:12But the result of all this was that by the time he went back home,
07:16everyone in the village felt that there had been a basic change in him.
07:18People who met him were certainly deeply impressed because they felt that he's achieved some kind of peculiar religious essence in these years of wandering.
07:35They met him once and they were deeply fascinated and regarded him as definitely a holy man.
07:43Many in the village began to suspect that there were deeper, darker reasons for the change in the young Rasputin.
07:51There was talk that during his wanderings he had fallen in with the secret sect called the Klisti.
07:56The Klisti were outlaws. This is, I think, a very significant point, that they were, like all the sects, the offshoots of the Russian Orthodox Church.
08:08They were an underground movement. They were on the run.
08:10They were a kind of anti-church. And I think that if Rasputin was going to go wandering in Siberia, he was definitely going to come up against them almost automatically.
08:24The Klisti had a very particular kind of worship that was nothing like the Orthodox Church.
08:37The Klisti gathered in cribs.
08:40Part of the service was dancing and part of the service was fagilation.
08:49There were no priests. There were leaders who were laypersons.
08:55They would gather. They would sing. They would pray.
08:57And they would work themselves into a kind of frenzy, which they called radienia, or ecstasy.
09:04And in the process of doing that, they would begin to dance and whirl about and become almost drunk on spinning.
09:12They actually called it spiritual beer, this dancing, this whirling.
09:16They were not intoxicated on physical substance, but on the very Holy Spirit itself.
09:23They would prophesy, they would become possessed by this divine force, speaking tones, that sort of strange allelation.
09:32They began strange feeling, like after narcotic.
09:38And more dancing, more feeling, dancing, non-stop dancing.
09:43And they felt that they changed.
09:45At that point where they had actually sort of built themselves into a fever pitch, they would then fall on the ground.
10:02Then what began was a kind of congregational orgy, where everybody just engaged in copulation with whoever was next to them.
10:10And there was sex going on all over the place.
10:16Many sects of Klist used this dancing and non-stop sex relations after.
10:24And it was a very powerful sect.
10:31And a very popular sect.
10:32These religious orgies were an essential part of the Klisti doctrine.
10:39They believed that by deliberately committing a carnal sin, they could repent more fervently and so get closer to God.
10:46They called it sinning to drive out sin.
10:49And it was an idea and a practice that Rasputin immediately seized hold of.
10:54For Rasputin, the idea of transcendence, the idea of all this energy flowing through the Ark, was really seductive.
11:05These people were actually able to achieve peculiar mystical and religious states by going to these extremes.
11:12I think that's what Rasputin had discovered.
11:15Extreme religious states that he was able to get into occasionally by going through what he felt to be sinful.
11:21Rasputin returned to Pokrovskaya and built a chapel in a pit beneath his house.
11:28He claimed to be a higher being, urged people to merge with him.
11:32And there were rumours that as part of a religious service, he would have sex with his congregation.
11:38He simply couldn't rest content with the levels that he'd come to.
11:43He had to be the source of the divine power.
11:46He'd seen visions all his life, but suddenly they became more intense.
11:53He appears to have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, and she apparently told him to go to St. Petersburg, where he would help the imperial family.
12:06While on his travels, he had impressed a number of aristocrats and clerics, and word had spread 1600 miles to St. Petersburg of a strange wandering holy man with powers of clairvoyance and healing.
12:19The city was the ultimate seat of power, and home to Tsar Nicholas II and the Empress Alexandra, two of the most powerful rulers in the world.
12:31Rasputin believed it was his destiny to be a holy fool, like Makkari, an advisor to the Tsar and Tsarina.
12:38At the age of 34, he began the long journey west.
12:51By 1903, word had reached St. Petersburg of a powerful mystic from Siberia with luminous wild eyes and a maniac stare.
12:59This was the home of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, the Empress Alexandra. The stage was set for Rasputin's arrival.
13:11St. Petersburg was definitely a very peculiar city at the beginning of the 20th century.
13:16The whole place was absolutely feverish with the peculiar mysticism.
13:31It was a place of great sexual permissiveness, even by continental standards.
13:37The newspapers of the time were full of advertisements for treatments for venereal disease.
13:42The aristocratic circles of the time were crazy for all things occult.
13:57This was a time of séances, Ouija boards, all sorts of theosophic and occult thought.
14:04So when news began to circulate that there was a mystical type with healing powers,
14:09the doors were open to grand dukes and duchesses and to acquaintances of the Tsar himself.
14:16While travelling through Russia, Rasputin had secured a letter of introduction to the Tsar's father confessor.
14:23He became convinced that Rasputin was a clairvoyant and immediately introduced him to a fanatical monk called Iliador
14:31and a powerful bishop called Hermogen.
14:33Bishop Hermogen was one of the most widely loved and liked men in St. Petersburg and he had a tremendous influence.
14:46Iliador was shocked by Rasputin's filthy appearance and pungent smell.
14:51But Hermogen saw this as evidence of his natural wisdom.
14:56His direct manner and ability to heal made Hermogen embrace him as a true holy man,
15:02referring to him simply as the saint.
15:06Aristocratic Salon soon became both electrified and terrified by his presence,
15:11with everyone talking of the blazing gaze of his magnetic light-coloured eyes.
15:15He turns up in the salons in the palaces in St. Petersburg.
15:22I think his immediate attraction is that he's a curiosity.
15:26He's this rather bedraggled figure with a long beard that had remnants of food in it.
15:32People said he smelt like a goat.
15:34He didn't seem to have any respect for authority, so he would pick his nose
15:38and he would tell women that they were too ostentatious in their wealth.
15:44And yet, at the same time, he had hypnotic eyes.
15:48People said that he could dilate his eyes at will.
15:53All sorts of society ladies found a magnetic charm,
15:58even perhaps a sexual attraction, simply in his physical appearance.
16:03While Rasputin entertained aristocrats,
16:05Tsar Nicholas and the Empress were holding regular seances with two Montenegrin princesses.
16:12Known as the Crows, they were fascinated by the occult
16:16and constantly supplied the royal couple with mystics they had met on their travels.
16:21Alexandra was a very, very superstitious woman,
16:25and she had been through the mill with various kinds of mystics and holy men and so on,
16:33before Rasputin came on the scene.
16:36The big search for her was, of course, she wanted a son.
16:40She wanted to provide Russia with an heir.
16:42When Alexandra finally gave birth to her son Alexie,
16:46she was convinced it was the result of divine intervention brought about by the help of a mystic charlatan called Dr. Philippe.
16:53Before his death, Philippe had promised her that someone was coming who would take his place.
16:58She adored anyone that she felt, you know, was some kind of holy man or healer.
17:06She just went absolutely overboard.
17:09And this is what happened in the case of Rasputin.
17:12On November the 1st, 1905, the Crows finally introduce Rasputin to the royal couple at a private dinner.
17:18That night, the Tsar noted in his diary,
17:22we have made the acquaintance of a man of God named Grigori.
17:26They needed simple peasant types, who they thought were more holy than cosmopolitan St Petersburg people,
17:34to buttress their regime.
17:36So they were automatically on the lookout for wanderers who had the touch of God,
17:43who might sanctify their power.
17:46And, of course, once the Tsarevich had been shown to be haemophiliac,
17:52they supposed that a holy man could cure him.
17:57After years of waiting for a son and heir, the Tsarevich, Alexei's fatal condition,
18:04was a personal tragedy for the royal couple,
18:07and threatened the stability of the entire Russian dynasty.
18:10The illness was kept a state secret, but on a later visit to the palace,
18:14Rasputin boldly asked to see their son.
18:17What happened next was to secure Rasputin's position as one of the most important figures in Russian history.
18:23It was really quite a remarkable occasion.
18:27He asked if he could pray over their son.
18:31And at the same time, he seemed to know what was wrong with him.
18:40So, you can imagine their reaction when this peasant from Siberia walks in
18:47and claims to know exactly what is wrong with their child.
18:53Alexei was in the middle of one of his crises.
18:57He'd been bleeding for some time from a knee injury.
19:02He knew that he could do this quite easily.
19:06He knew that he could cure.
19:09He'd done it so often.
19:13He would go deeper and deeper inside himself,
19:16until suddenly he'd become totally oblivious of his surroundings.
19:21And it was in that state that he contacted some hidden strength,
19:26some hidden power inside him,
19:28and knew that he could actually cure.
19:30The next morning, he wakes up and he's completely cured.
19:38Proof in the minds of the royal couple of a miracle.
19:43Haemophilia was completely incurable.
19:47So, anything or any body that could cure that disease
19:51would instantly make that person amazingly powerful as far as the royal couple were concerned,
19:57and particularly as far as Alexandra was concerned.
20:00Rasputin would later tell them that without him, the child would die.
20:05Within months, he had free reign of the royal palace,
20:08visiting the royal couple uninvited,
20:11and referring to the Tsar and Tsarina as Mama and Papa.
20:14We know from his own braggings that he had unlimited access to the daughters,
20:22and he meant access to be understood ambiguously.
20:27We know that he met the Empress on an almost weekly basis,
20:33and could be summoned to her at all times of day and night.
20:39So, he was an intimate, a confidante.
20:42He treated Tsarina herself.
20:46Tsarina was incredible, nervous person.
20:50And Rasputin was the only man who was able to take off her headaches,
20:57who gave her opportunity to relax.
21:05It became known just how much influence he had to the royal court,
21:09that he had the ear of the Tsarina herself,
21:12and that a word from Rasputin in those ears could achieve just about anything that you desired.
21:20So, curry in favor with Rasputin was a pretty much direct route straight to the Tsar and Tsarina.
21:27Rasputin moved into this apartment in Gorokovaya Street.
21:38People were soon queuing up to be near the strange holy peasant,
21:44who was intimate with the Tsar and the Empress.
21:46This is his power base, really. He didn't just live here.
21:52And this is where he entertained numerous visitors.
21:57This is where the little ladies would come, his prostitutes, his female devotees,
22:02from all levels of the social spectrum.
22:04He called them his fools, those who needed to be educated to see the spiritual light.
22:16It was here that Rasputin began developing his own religious doctrine,
22:21based on ideas and practices he had learned from the Klisti in Siberia.
22:25He encouraged his fools to sin with him, so that their forgiveness afterwards would bring them closer to God.
22:33And there was no shortage of eager volunteers.
22:41It was here that Rasputin began developing his own religious doctrine,
22:45based on ideas and practices he had learned from the Klisti in Siberia.
22:50He encouraged his fools to sin with him,
22:52so that their forgiveness afterwards would bring them closer to God.
22:57And there was no shortage of eager volunteers.
23:00They would have a strange ritual of eating and drinking when they were assembled for one of Rasputin's salons.
23:07They would all sit around with Rasputin in the centre by the table with all the offerings upon it.
23:15There would be seductions that these women would have passed through his special back room,
23:20where the first of the sexual advances would take place.
23:28I went to see Rasputin.
23:30He sat down across from me, placing my legs between his knees.
23:37Someone terrifying and ruthless was gazing at me from the depths of those eyes.
23:42Without sin there is no life, because there is no repentance, and if there is no repentance, there is no joy.
23:55You want me to show you what sin is?
23:57He pulled me into the bedroom and tore off my dress as we went.
24:06The next moment, he was noisened by savage animal desire.
24:11The last thing I remember is his tearing off my underwear.
24:15Then I passed out.
24:16I woke up and found myself lying on the ground, torn and defiled.
24:23One disciple, Olga Lochtina, became convinced that Rasputin was Christ and that she was the Holy Virgin.
24:31Abandoning her children and wealthy husband, she descended into madness and was seen holding Rasputin's penis,
24:37while screaming, you are Christ and I am your you.
24:42He said she was a skunk who demanded sin.
24:45It was not sex.
24:47It was way to God.
24:50He took everything which was terrible in their souls.
24:55They became absolutely clean.
24:57They became like children.
24:59They like themselves in that moment, because they were on the heaven.
25:08For them it was absolutely normal.
25:12It was non-stop connection between sex, religion, miracles and so on.
25:32But outside the apartment Rasputin was making enemies.
25:35Senior politicians heard rumours that the new friend of the Empress was not to be trusted.
25:41Secret police were put on his tail and their reports only fuelled more rumours that the Empress Alexandra was confiding in a dark force.
25:50December the first.
25:54From the monastery Rasputin went to Goncharna and took a prostitute to a hotel.
25:583 December.
25:59He visited the offices of two religious newspapers, after which he took a prostitute in December.
26:05After visiting Mrs. Golovin and her daughter he took a prostitute.
26:07That evening he went to the royal palace.
26:10The dark one walked around the streets accosting women with vile suggestions.
26:14After visiting two prostitutes he went to see the Golovin's.
26:18The dark one left there around two o'clock and again hired a prostitute and went to the bathhouse with her.
26:23And it was in the privacy of the St. Petersburg bathhouses that Rasputin's new religious doctrine really took shape.
26:34For Russian peasants bathhouses were places of magic and superstition.
26:38Most Siberians were born in one and there were places to conjure spirits both good and evil.
26:53The bathhouses were places of carnal sin in the most deep and pure sense.
27:00These are wet moist wombs and here people come into contact with the spirituality of the flesh, the worship, the adoration of that which is carnal.
27:14This is one of the bathhouses where he would have come frequently to Rasputin's mind.
27:32These were places where he would come to conduct a particular kind of holy service.
27:38You see Rasputin had a peasant's mentality in many ways and he dealt with the devil exactly as you deal with a Siberian wolf.
27:51He was hunting the devil down on the devil's own turf.
28:08Rasputin seems to have taken the devil into himself, waged that whole spiritual battle on the turf of his own body.
28:21He was calling the devil forth, taking the devil into his own flesh.
28:26He performed this ritual where he was trying to exercise the demon of lechery and in fact beating the woman that he brought into the bathhouse with him, roaring at her, going on about the demon of lechery and how he was going to beat it out of her.
28:46Then, afterwards, they copulated.
28:53He was convinced in himself that he was strong enough to carry out these unorthodox forms of worship.
29:08He was strong enough to take the Holy Spirit within him into the places where the devil, as he would have seen it, dwelled.
29:18These escalating battles with the devil soon started to take their toe.
29:24He was seen leaving the bathhouses talking wildly with himself.
29:27It was conversation with devil on the street.
29:36Devil, for him, was a real person.
29:42And he had non-stop conversation with him.
29:48He's on this spiritual journey and he thinks he can drive out sin by sinning.
29:53But, in fact, the sin captures him and he can't drive it out.
29:58He's angry with the demons that are inside of him that he can't actually get rid of.
30:03Those who have the power to work miracles are liable to suffer something which is called spiritual temptation.
30:11Which basically means that your power source is suddenly switched so that you are performing miracles by the devil's power rather than God's.
30:20They're still miracles. They're just evil miracles.
30:23So when word got out that Rasputin was not only working miracles but also living what was perceived to be a terribly debauched and dissolute lifestyle,
30:33the authorities of the church took action.
30:38Hermogen and Iliador, key figures in securing Rasputin's access to the throne,
30:44lured Rasputin to a basement where they accused him of using the power of the devil to work his healing miracles.
30:50He was quite happy up until the point when they rounded on him and really laid into him quite viciously,
31:00telling him that he was in a state of spiritual temptation, that he had gone too far, that what he was doing was of the anti-Christ.
31:07And Hermogen at one point grabbed him by the penis and said, this, this is what is leading you.
31:16They battered him with a crucifix. They literally, physically belaboured him with it.
31:21Deeply shocked, Rasputin reported the event of the Saarina, saying that the two clerics had tried to kill him.
31:31Within a month, she banished them both from the city.
31:34But Iliador was not to be silenced and fled to Finland disguised as a woman, plotting a way to kill what he saw as the devil incarnate.
31:47Rasputin went back to his own village of Pokorovsko on the 27th of June, 1914.
31:52The following day, at about 2.15 in the afternoon, the postman brought him a telegram.
32:01Rasputin wandered out to the post office to send a return telegram.
32:10At this time, the most peculiar-looking woman came up to him and Rasputin handed her some alms.
32:15And then, suddenly, she lunged at him with a knife and managed to get the knife, more or less, into his stomach.
32:22Zenya Guseva, a deformed ex-prostitute with no nose, had been sent by Iliador to kill Rasputin.
32:30Despite pulling his intestines out of his body, she failed to kill him.
32:35But his long stay in hospital was to have a huge impact on the fate of Europe.
32:39Just hours earlier, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated 2,000 miles away in Sarajevo,
32:47sending Europe spiralling into the worst war the world had yet seen.
32:52Rasputin was probably the only person who could have talked the Tsar out of mobilising.
32:58But stranded in Siberia, he was helpless.
33:01There was nothing Rasputin could do about it by the time he got out of hospital and went to see the Tsar.
33:07He wrote to him from hospital saying, please, no war, no war.
33:11The Tsar didn't want to hear because declaring war had suddenly made him the most popular man in Russia,
33:18and he never had any popularity.
33:20Before that, not with the ordinary people, now seeing these great cheering crowds wherever he went,
33:25he didn't want to hear what Rasputin had to tell him, but Rasputin proved to be perfectly right.
33:29The war, in fact, was the end of Russia.
33:31Rasputin wrote a letter to the Tsar.
33:37A terrible storm cloud hangs over Russia.
33:41Disaster, grief, murky darkness, and no light.
33:45A whole ocean of tears.
33:49There is no counting them.
33:51And so much blood.
33:54I can find no words to describe the horror.
33:58We will all drown in blood.
34:01The disaster is great.
34:04The misery infinite.
34:05The misery infinite.
34:15Rasputin returned to St. Petersburg more powerful than he'd ever been.
34:20The Empress summoned him to the palace and asked his advice on the war effort.
34:23Of course, when the war started and the Tsar went off to the front,
34:29then quite suddenly Rasputin, in a sense, became Tsar.
34:33With her husband away from home, Alexandra became increasingly dependent on Rasputin,
34:39becoming convinced that the safety of her family was entirely in his hands.
34:43He began regularly advising her on affairs of state and the war,
34:48advice that she duly passed on to Nicholas at the front.
34:50In the space of two years, Rasputin oversaw the appointment of four prime ministers,
34:56four war ministers, and six ministers of the interior.
35:00Rasputin was, in many ways, behind a desk.
35:05He was hiring and firing ministers.
35:07He not only moved in circles of power, he created circles of power,
35:12according to who was on side and who wasn't.
35:15But, nearly all Rasputin's interference in politics was a disaster.
35:23Nearly all of his nominees and so on were total idiots.
35:27Things just went from bad to worse with Rasputin as the man who was making the suggestions.
35:33The war was a disaster, the worst Russia had ever suffered, bringing the entire country to its knees.
35:43Four million Russians were killed, and St. Petersburg became awash with rumour, refugees and mass demonstrations.
35:51The suicide rate tripled, the cost of bread quadrupled, bakeries were looted.
35:59The air was thick with talk of revolution.
36:03Just strike a tiny match, said one observer, and everything will go up in flames.
36:12By 1914, St. Petersburg was the capital of a nation at war.
36:17The poet Gippius called it a lunatic asylum, with the inmates of the city unable to tell the difference between what's real and what's false.
36:25But no one felt the madness more than Rasputin, whose personal battles with the devil were proving too much.
36:35His health began to break down, and that when his health began to break down, he ceased to have this healing ability that he'd had.
36:43He tried to heal some woman who'd come along to him with awful arthritis, and had sat there praying and praying and praying, and somehow nothing happened.
36:56He couldn't get down to that deep level inside himself, where the power came from.
37:02And it was then that I think he began to feel that he, like everybody else, was due for extinction.
37:08Do you know that soon I shall die in terrible pain?
37:13God has sent me to be sacrificed, to save our dear sovereign and holy Russia.
37:19Despite my terrible sins, I am a Christ in miniature.
37:27He wrote to the Empress, prophesying his own murder.
37:30I wish to make known that if your relations bring about my death, then none of your family will remain alive for more than two years.
37:40They will all be killed by the Russian people.
37:43Tell your relatives that I have already paid for them with my blood.
37:48I shall be killed.
37:49I am no longer among the living.
37:55Pray and be strong.
38:01I think he was a deeply troubled spirit, as it were, that he really was wrestling with forces that he didn't feel that he could control.
38:11Rasputin visited his friend Filipov, sobbing after a drunken night with St. Petersburg gypsies.
38:19He'd squandered 2,000 rubles and had to visit the Empress that same day.
38:25Rasputin wept, declaring that he was no longer holy, but was a devil, a demon.
38:30Outside, the city had been rechristened Chetrograd, devil town.
38:40And the streets were buzzing with the rumor that Rasputin was a spy who shared the bed of the half-German Empress.
38:47He had split the nation.
38:49To some, he was the voice of old Russia, advising the throne.
38:54To others, he represented all that was wrong with the Tsar and the court.
38:57He was ignorant, corrupt, and far too powerful.
39:03Rasputin's real political significance is as a negative,
39:08as an image of the treason which was believed, at a national level, existed in the court.
39:16The problem that all people had with Rasputin was that he was basically bringing the autocracy down.
39:27They thought that they could still salvage the divine principle of autocracy, of Russian nationalism which went with it,
39:37so long as they could get rid of this malevolent influence.
39:40A fanatical politician called Perushkevich made a sensational speech in the state parliament, naming Rasputin as a dark force.
39:59A rascal, a chlyst, a dirty, illiterate peasant is playing with our churchmen.
40:09What a beast are they taking us into?
40:12I want to sacrifice myself and kill this vile creature.
40:15Evil comes from those dark forces, from the influences headed by Rasputin, the evil genius of Russia.
40:25The next day he received a telephone call from a young aristocratic bisexual called Felix Yusupov.
40:31Felix Yusupov was one of the richest men in Russia, probably the richest, and immensely good-looking.
40:40He was a dandy and a well-known homosexual who had, it seems, had homosexual relations with Rasputin.
40:54Convinced that Rasputin had become the satanic power behind the throne, Yusupov and Perushkevich approached the Tsar's cousin Pavlovich.
41:04Together the three men hatched a plot to salvage the royal dynasty.
41:09Yusupov's account of how he killed the mad monk of Siberia has become the ultimate Rasputin legend.
41:15On the day of Rasputin's death, Yusupov had asked him to go around there at an odd time midnight to meet his wife Irina, who was known as one of the most beautiful women in St Petersburg.
41:28They waited until the secret police had stopped hanging around Rasputin's apartment, and then they went to pick Rasputin up in a car, and they took him back to the Yusupov Palace.
41:38There he was taken down to a basement dining room, which had been laid out as if for a meal, and what's more, they tried to make it look as if a lot of people had been sitting around the table.
41:53They twisted up the napkins and poured a bit of tea into the tea cups and all that kind of thing.
41:58And so Rasputin sat there quite contentedly. He was told that Irina was still upstairs with the remaining guests, and that as soon as they'd gone, they'd have a conversation.
42:08Rasputin sat there. They presented him with a plate containing lots and lots of cream cakes, and they also presented him with wine, and Rasputin at first didn't touch either.
42:20Then, finally, Rasputin got a bit bored with all this, and proceeded to eat the cakes and to swig down the wine.
42:37Now, there was enough cyanide, both in the wine and the cakes, to kill most people.
42:41Two hours and a half, he continued to be still alive after he ate endless cakes with poison.
42:57According to Yusupov, the massive doses of poison had no effect. He started to believe that Rasputin was being protected by demonic forces.
43:08Panicking, he ran back upstairs, borrowed a revolver, and returned to confront him.
43:13You would expect Rasputin to do something violent then, or at least to plead for his life. He did neither, apparently just stood there.
43:22While Yusupov let off a shot at him, and Rasputin sank to the carpet.
43:26They were upstairs celebrating the death of Rasputin, but Felix couldn't shake the idea that something might be wrong.
43:39He opened the door and saw the body which was on the floor, but when he began to see, he saw how one of Rasputin's eyes a little bit began to open.
43:54He was still alive.
43:58Back from the dead, Rasputin tried to throttle Yusupov, who broke free, started screaming, and fled upstairs.
44:05The doctor who had supplied the cyanide fainted in terror.
44:09Then they went back downstairs, and to their horror, Rasputin wasn't there anymore.
44:14And then they found that he called up a flight of stairs out of the remote crawling across the courtyard in the snow.
44:21Out in the courtyard, Yusupov fired twice at point-blank range, but Rasputin kept going, shouting back that he was going to tell the Empress.
44:32Then the Tsar's cousin, Pavlovich, fired two more shots, hitting him squarely in the back and then the head.
44:39Yusupov ran over in hysterics and began bludgeoning the body with a metal kosh.
44:45The shot-poisoned bloody but still not quite dead Rasputin is bundled up, stuffed into a car and driven many miles out in the ice and snow to a bridge on the outskirts of St. Petersburg.
45:01By five in the morning, the conspirators were stuffing Rasputin's body through a hole in the ice, hoping that the current would drag it out to sea.
45:11But two days later, a grotesque frozen corpse was pulled from the river.
45:16The superstitious of St. Petersburg flocked to the site, scooping up water that the dead man had lain in.
45:24An autopsy found water in his lungs, suggesting he was still alive when thrown into the river.
45:29His body was buried, then dug up and burnt at a roadside, just as he predicted months earlier.
45:39His own death at the hands of the Tsar's relatives led to the complete annihilation of the royal family.
45:46Within 12 months of his murder, Nicholas, Alexandra and all five children were gunned down in a Siberian cellar.
45:54Rasputin's friends were shot by firing squad, civil war broke out and the nation imploded.
46:04I think he was a holy man in the fullest sense of the word.
46:07All of these other things, the seductions and so on, can be explained as a part of his peculiar obsession with getting rid of sin through sin.
46:17No one can be sure whether Rasputin was simply a misunderstood peasant or a devil in the flesh.
46:24Whatever the truth, his image has become a modern icon of evil and darkness.
46:30Russia's own holy devil.
46:33Russia's mother's friend Michael
46:50...
46:52...
46:54...
46:58...
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