Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin

Haemophilia sealed Rasputin's fate. Tsarevich Alexei suffered from a severe form of the disease in which even a bruise could trigger unstoppable internal bleeding, and contemporary medicine was helpless. It is unclear exactly when Rasputin first acted as a healer, but in the spring of 1907, when Alexei suffered an internal haemorrhage, Empress Alexandra summoned Rasputin to pray for him. The boy recovered the next morning, and the empress's trust was cemented.

The turning point came in the autumn of 1912 at the imperial hunting lodge at Spała. A jolting carriage ride caused a massive haematoma in Alexei's thigh and groin; delirious with fever and in agonizing pain, the tsarevich appeared close to death. The court physicians were powerless. Alexandra, in desperation, had a telegram sent to Rasputin in Siberia. He replied at once: "God has seen your tears and heard your prayers. Do not grieve. The Little One will not die. Do not allow the doctors to bother him too much." The bleeding stopped the next day. Dr. S. P. Fedorov, one of the attending physicians, later admitted that "the recovery was wholly inexplicable from a medical point of view."

That single episode elevated Rasputin from a mere mystic into an indispensable presence at court. Alexandra became convinced that without Rasputin her son would die, a conviction that, during the war, became the psychological foundation for relying on him even in ministerial appointments. Later physicians have speculated that Rasputin may have simply kept the doctors from administering aspirin, then widely used as a painkiller but unknown as an anti-clotting agent until the 1950s. Yet for the empress, it was a miracle. And that belief became a political force that ran through the empire's final decade.

In September 1915, Nicholas II left for the front to take personal command of the army, and domestic governance of the Russian Empire fell to Empress Alexandra. Every decision she made passed through Rasputin. Though he held no official title, Rasputin controlled key ministerial appointments during the war, and between 1915 and 1916 Russia experienced the so-called "ministerial leapfrog": three prime ministers, five interior ministers, four war ministers, and three foreign ministers cycled through office.

Rasputin's personnel principle was simple: the petitions and bribes of his circle, and above all, demonstrated loyalty to the Empress. A barely literate Siberian peasant, he would approach ministers, embrace and kiss them, and say, "Now, let us do as Christ commands", while telling the Empress that the Virgin Mary had appeared in his dreams to instruct a particular appointment. Duma deputy Vladimir Purishkevich declared publicly in November 1916 that the tsar's ministers had "been turned into marionettes, marionettes whose threads have been taken firmly in hand by Rasputin and the Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, the evil genius of Russia." As the war bogged down and food shortages deepened, all discontent focused on the German-born Empress and her "holy man."

Rasputin himself knew that his fate and the empire's were inseparable. In a letter he reportedly sent to Nicholas II shortly before his death, he prophesied: "If I am killed by boyars and nobles, their hands will remain stained with my blood, and for twenty-five years they will not be able to wash them clean. They will abandon Russia. Brother will rise against brother and kill each other, and for twenty-five years there will be no nobility in the land.… None of your family will live longer than two years. They will be killed." Two months after his murder the dynasty fell; a year and a half later the imperial family was executed.

On the night of December 16, 1916 (O.S.), Prince Felix Yusupov lured Rasputin to the basement of the Yusupov Palace on the Moika, promising to introduce his wife Irina, who was in fact in Crimea. Yusupov later claimed he served Madeira wine and rose-colored pastries laced with potassium cyanide, but the autopsy found no food in the stomach. Yusupov shot Rasputin at close range; he collapsed but soon regained consciousness and fled toward a courtyard door. Vladimir Purishkevich, hearing the shots, gave chase and fired four bullets, two of which struck. The body was driven to Krestovsky Island and dropped through the ice of the Malaya Nevka. The autopsy by Dmitry Kosorotov determined death was caused by a point-blank gunshot to the forehead. Buried at Tsarskoye Selo on December 21, Rasputin's body was exhumed after the February Revolution and burned in the boiler of the Petrograd Polytechnical Institute on the night of March 10–11, 1917.