In the dying days of the Russian Empire, highborn ladies would willingly cut the dirty fingernails of the peasant Grigori Rasputin and then sew the clippings onto their dresses like sacred talismans. He would, on occasion, take six women to a bathhouse, then order them to strip naked and wash him. “If I say, ‘Bathe my feet,’ they’ll do as I say and then drink the water.”
At any other time, Rasputin’s mesmeric power might have been harmless, yet another example of a country’s thirst for the occult. Among his conquests, however, was the Czarina Alexandra, and that rendered him dangerous. He would eventually claim the right to choose ministers and shape policy, always to ill effect. In his new biography of the czarina’s enigmatic adviser, Antony Beevor insists that “he contributed more than any other individual to the collapse of the greatest autocracy in the world.”
