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his followers. They called him a pseudo prophet and damned him for teaching spiritual delusions that were opposite of the traditions of the Orthodox Church. But the article didn't stop at condemning Resputant's delusions and false holiness. It also attacked

other areas of his life. It accused Grigory of being a lazy, deadbeat, a man who had abandoned his family in Pokrovsko, whose children were fatherless and unruly, and the thor even said that in investigating his piece, he had spoken with a church leader who called Gregory a heretic

and a sexual predator. As far as the press goes this was about as damning as it gets, and digging behind the article we can see why, like so many others in Russia, the journalist who wrote the Peace believed that the church was in trouble and needed to be reformed. Like our command right theo fan, the writer looked to

Russia's wandering holy men as a source of hope. In some ways, Gregory seemed like exactly the kind of person he was looking for, a peasant who had formed a bridge between the Czar and the peasant class, bringing the voice of the so called ordinary Russian to the ear of the Czar himself. But here's the problem. Rasputant's dark side was actually giving all of Russia's holy men a bad name, claiming to be a holy leader while using his position to feed on the vulnerabilities of his followers.

It's easy to see why anyone would think this left their approach in tatters. If they were going to hold onto the idea that Russian holy men could revitalize the faith and life of the Empire, they had to figure out how things had gone so wrong with Grigory. If condemning Rasputant as a heretic and a letger sounds familiar. That's because it was the message our command right theo Fan was spreading far and wide. In fact, theo Fan himself might be the churchman who worked with the author

behind the scenes. But regardless of who the hidden sources were for the writer, the fact is that defenders of the Church and defenders of the Czar alike swarmed to the takedown like it fed their starving souls. Other papers across Russia instantly copied the article and reprinted it. They knew when there was blood in the water, and what sells a paper better than a sex scandal at the crossroads of the Church and the Crown. Once again, the

paper had taken the public's temperature. Letters flooded into the Moscow Gazette. New stories of Grigory restputants bad behavior were piled onto the first reports, and as the accusations mounted, it led the editors of the Gazette to trumpet one question above the clamoring throng. If Grigory Resputin was such a dangerous conman, why didn't the Church or the Crown

rise up and do something to root him out? The monarchist newspapers thought they might open Nicholas's eyes to the dangers of Resputin and separate the monarchy from the mystic. But the reformers and revolutionaries across Russia were only too happy to point out that Resputin and the Romanovs seemed to be inseparable. They followed the monarchist press in denouncing Rasputin, not to save the imperial family, but to condemn it.

Their answer to the question of why Nicholas didn't do something was that the Romanovs themselves were hapless fools and needed to be thrown out along with their court soothsayers. Issue after issue delved into Resputant's background, his heretical teaching, and his violence against women. To the leftist press, all

of these were the fault of Nicholas and Alexandra. None of these press reports got the story right, though monarchists and revolutionaries alike layered rumor and insinuation over every kernel of truth. But all the reporting was eaten up by a public hungry for more news about the secret inner workings of the Romanov's domestic world. And then there's this deep irony to contend with. Russia at the time was

an empire divided. Not only were revolutionary groups and monarchist brigades battling each other for the future of Russia, but they were often fighting within their own ranks. Each faction rarely managed to maintain their alliances for long, and yet in Rasputin they were now finding a common cause, or better put, a common enemy. This is unobscured. I'm Aaron Manky. Yeah,

the attacks on Rasputin went international. If the Russian papers thought they were cleaning house and taking down Rasputin, they couldn't foresee just how far the stories about him would travel and how long the legends they were creating would endure. Within a few weeks, the splashy articles were being distributed

across Russia. The Austrian ambassador wrote back to Vienna about the unfolding scandal, and, of course, for the royals across Europe, the question of how Nicholas and Alexandra could take a heretical priest into their confidence was a real puzzle, and the ambassador offered his view. The royal couple were simply unwilling to see that their relationship with Grigory Rasputin was a problem. It was a real flash of insights. He saw that in the eyes of Nicholas and Alexandra. Rasputin

was untouchable. But it wasn't just the stories about the Romanov's spiritual advisor that slipped the borders of Russia. It was the Romanovs themselves. In the years after the nineteen oh five Revolution, and with all the changes that were shaking Russian society, Nicholas and Alexandra often found time to get away from it all. Not that this was anything new. Hunting lodges and holiday homes were always the privilege of

the European royals. Nicholas and Alexandra were no exception, and of course family visits double as political meetings when the family are all heads of states. For example, ever since their marriage began, Nicholas and Alexandra had regularly traveled back to her old stomping grounds in Germany, and Nicholas even

had a Russian Orthodox chapel built for Alexander there. Often they stayed with Alexandra's brother Ernie at his summer retreat, or visited relatives in the Danish royal family, and these visits didn't slow down as their family grew. As things heated up at home. I can only imagine that they were too happy to slip the troubled borders of their empire, leave the trouble some issues in the hands of a prime minister like stoile Epan, and try to find some

cleaner air. Of course, there was a more personal reason that the Romana family would have wanted to retreat from the turmoil of their empire into some sort of tranquility. You see, Alexandra was sick, and the truth was she had been sick for years. Here's historian Helen Rappaport to

tell us more. I think Alexandra clearly was plagued with sciatica from her teens, because when it was announced she was going to marry Nikki in April eighteen nine four, one of the first things Queen Victoria arranged was to get her treatment for this crippling scietic pain she suffered from. So she was sent to Harrogate for a water cure, and that was the first probably of money later on in her life, after she'd tapped the children, they she went more than once, I think, to bad Noihan in

Germany for again for wat cures. So she had always had the scietica and I cannot imagine how painful her pregnancies must have been suffering from sciatic pain and carrying you know, ten eleven pound babies to term. She must have been dreadfully consumed by pain at times, and she was often had to be lying down. She genuinely had terrible ear infections and me grains, and oh gosh, there wasn't almost any complaints she didn't at sometime suffer from.

So that kind of colored family life, I think more than perhaps we realize. Even when they weren't traveling for treatment, abandoning the pressure of court, life in Russia was itself an enormous relief, and there's perhaps no trip that the Empress liked better than a holiday to the islands around Finland in the Tsar's personal Yat when life in Russia got tense or threat to the Czar made their routines dangerous,

Nicholas and Alexander would take to the water. They're surrounded by a loyal crew, with warships from the Imperial Fleet bobbing in formation on all sides. Nicholas and Alexandra felt their most carefree, prying eyes were left far behind. The naval officers who served them on board were kind and obliging, and all the guns pointed outward. But even those floating fantasies came back to earth, and when they did, the troubles of Russia proved they couldn't be left behind. Take

their visit to England in nineteen o nine. Along the way, the Romanovs stopped to see Alexandra's sister Irene and made an appearance for the President of France. And then they were on towards England, where their royal cousins were eager to greet them. Not so the English people, though, you see, word had spread of the fact that Nicholas used his Cossacks against the Russian people in nineteen o five. The violence of his autocratic control over the Russian Empire was

no secrets. Socialist rallies in London were held as the Romanov's yacht sailed toward British soil. The Young British Labor Party collected resolutions from a cross Britain condemning the blood on the hands of the Czar, the terrorism of his supporters like Iliador, and the actions of the Russian secret police. And it should be pointed out if we remember the way the Czar's Cossacks ran down protesting workers in nineteen o five. We have to say the British workers who

rallied in Trafalgar Square had a point. Maybe that's why everyone from schools to evangelical societies to trade unions all signed on to condemn the Romanov's visit. Nicholas may have been surprised by how well British radicals knew the inner workings of Russian politics, but the creeping fear he felt when he heard they were discussing his assassination would have been all too familiar. It was the feeling he fled when the family took to the sea, so Nicholas and

Alexandra made their visit a short one. The coastal towns were flooded with English and Russian police, who choked them to a standstill. It could have only confirmed to the Czar's critics that Russia was ruled with an iron fist. At night, the romanov was retreated to their floating fortress. When they visited Sweden, Nicholas and Alexandra didn't even dare

to set foot on land. So the imperial family didn't have the best reputation beyond the borders of their empire, let alone among the people they held under their power at the time, and that was all before the press sank their teeth into the story of Grigory Rasputin. Resputant had his defenders, of course, and maybe no one was more energetic in his defense than the mad monk himself,

the terrorist preacher Eliodor. Not to be outdone by the inflamed accusations of the newspaper, Eliodor began to fabricate some stories of his own. Resputin was not a sexual predator, said Eliodor, so much the opposite, in fact, that Gregory had mastered his sexual urges so much that he no longer made love to his own wife. He lived with special holiness. He was Russia's saving grace. Anyone who wrote attacks against Resputant should be bound and beaten bloody, that

was Eliador's message. Not a pleasant fellow, really, But Eliodora's bloodthirsty defenses of Resputin were nearly as effective as Resputant's own technique to disappear. Throughout most of nineteen ten, there were several points where even the Russian secret police, the Okrana, had no idea where Resputant was. His disappearance was all about giving the scandal time to blow over and for newspapers to find something else to blow up about. And

there was one man in Russia willing to oblige. That's right, Eliodor himself. Do you remember how I told you that Resputant had orchestrated a one on one meeting between Eliador and the Empress. She had forced a few promises out of the man. Maybe he agreed in the moment, but

he swiftly changed his mind. Soon enough, he was back in his pulpit, letting fly against the Czar, the government of the Duma, the Prime Minister, and just about everyone else he considered a part of Russia's decline, and that included leaders in the church. Now, obviously they didn't take too kindly to that, and they sent an order. The monk Iliodor was being reassigned once again. This time he was supposed to leave his base in the city of Tzaritsin and go where he couldn't make so much trouble,

the remote monastery of Novozil. But leaving his influential position on the banks of the Volga River was the last thing Eliador wanted to do. His first course of action was a frantic message to Siberia he was calling on help from Rasputin. Of course, after all, Grigory had been able to arrange a one on one meeting with the Empress the last time he got in trouble. Why couldn't he use the same get out of jail free card again? And while he waited for an answer, he took some action.

Gathering his closest disciples around him, Eliodor retreated into his monastery compound and barricaded the doors. Douglas Smith writes that Iliador even started blasting out messages in his typical bombastic style that he wouldn't leave unless every of the monastery was covered in his own blood, that he would see his home become his grave before he would be sidelined

by the church, you know, the usual stuff. Now, we don't know if Rasputin was involved in what happened next, but it's clear that the news made its way to Nicholas and the Tsar was having none of it. Naturally, he sided with the leaders of the Russian Church. They should do what they needed to do to tamp down this violent dissenter. After all, it's not like Eliador had been cultivating goodwill with anyone among Russia's elite. All this back and forth made its way into black and white.

Soon enough, the papers were saying that Eliador had rallied his terrorist followers to his cause. And it wasn't a small movement either. By one reckoning, thousands of people had traveled the Volga to gather around Iliador. It looked more and more like a fight was brewing. The twists and turns and the story were complex. It was a story of espionage, secret agents, and back room deals. To sum

it up simply, though, a plex bargaining process began. While Nicholas sent negotiators to hash out the situation with Iliador, Rasputin rushed back into the Romanov's lives once again to discuss things with them behind the scenes. The situation was explosive. Realizing that Grigory was out of hiding, the Prime Minister met with Nicholas. He wanted to convince the Czar that Grigory was bad for the throne and bad for the empire. He put all of Russia at risk. Nicholas, though, wasn't convinced.

He essentially met the Prime Minister with a shrug and he said, why don't you just meet with Rasputin yourself? So finally, after months of ducking the secret police, Nicholas had to arrange it. Grigory met face to face with Prime ministers Stoi Leepin and Stoi Lepin, came armed for the encounter. When they faced off, he showed Grigory a file packed with reports from the Russian secret police. He said they proved that Rasputant was a heretic who had

betrayed the Russian Church. Stoy Leepin believed that by threatening Grigory he could get the man to back down and disappear from the Imperial Court, but he didn't know just how much Resputant believed that he was on a mission from God. Grigory dared Soy Leapin to show the file not to Nicholas, but to Alexandra, and then when they went their separate ways, Gregory wasted no time. He told

the Empress about the police reports himself. All that the Prime Minister earned from the encounter was Alexander's fury raspute, and was right. The Romanovs were on his side. This swirl of activity around the Romanovs did nothing to shake Iliador from his fortified monastery. The mad monk was still sending Rasputin messages asking for help and lane plans to

grow his power. At one point he even pretended to cooperate for a while and took to the road, but in the end it was only just buying time for him to gather more die hard believers to his cause.

He circled back to his headquarters with even more supporters in tow In fact, he had gathered an army men and women had marched to his fortress by the tens of thousands, all of them hung on Iliador's every word as he called for the new representative government of Russia to be torn down in a shower of blood, and for people like Prime Minister Stoilepen to be beaten in the streets. And even as it got more and more hypocritical, Eliador and his followers still held onto the idea that

all of this was actually helping the Czar. It was, as Dr Heather Coleman puts it, a naive monarchism. Historians have pointed to a great phenomenon of naive monarchism of of ordinary people who who believed that the that the government um was the problem and if only they could get to the Tsar, that Ssar was was faithful to the to the to the to the little guy and um, and that you know. The problem was the bureaucrats in between.

As these ideas grew more powerful and il Door added to his numbers, Nicholas had a choice to make turn the full might of his imperial forces on rebellious monarchists or give them free reign to undermine his government. The choice he made was a fateful one, because in the end Nicholas backed down. He issued a full pardon for Eliador. The mad monk had gone up against the Czar and one, but that victory sowed the seeds of his own downfall.

In beating the Tsar, these self defeating monarchists proved once again that the Czar could be beaten. This very public battle between the Tsar and the terrorist preacher had distracted the press from the story of Rasputin, but it hadn't distracted the rest of the Romanov family. Knowing that meetings with Grigory had happened behind the scenes, the other Romanovs believed that Resputant was really the one behind Nicholas's decision

to fold in the face of Eliadora's growing forces. So at one point Nicholas's mother, the Dowager Empress, decided it was time to take her son in hand. She met with Nicholas and al Alexandra in the palace. She gave her boy a good tongue lashing. She demanded that Nicholas and the scandal sever the friendship and send respute in away. Alexandra fought fire with fire. As the Czarina, she refused to be pushed around by her mother in law no matter what anyone thought, and in the end the Dowager

Empress left defeated. Throughout the fight with his mother and wife trading ferocious arguments, Nicholas, it said, sat in silence. He put Russia behind him. After all, it was true, the scandal did need time to blow over. So Grigory Rasputin set out to the one place he always wanted to go. He wanted to refresh his soul, to commune

with God, so he went to the Holy Land. But if that conjures up stories of Grigory's early religious life, of his wanderings and his lonely struggles on the road, that might give us the idea, because this wasn't quite the kind of lonely pilgrimage to Jerusalem that a holy man might make on a shoestring and a prayer. Quite the contrary, Resputant was doing something popular. It turns out that the trip sounds a lot like the kind of Holy Land tourism that people are still doing today. Here's

historian Douglas Smith to explain. It's not as exotic maybe as it first seems that, you know, a Russian in nineteen eleven would be going to the Holy Land. There were actually packaged tours that Russians would go on that would take them to see the places connected to the life of Jesus. And this is essentially what he did as he went on one one of these package tours,

if you will. But he was profoundly moved by the experience, and he wrote about it, and he sent letters back to Nicholas and Alexandra about the meaning it had for him. One of the things that he came back with was a renewed um conviction that the only true form of

Christianity was Russian orthod docsy. That was just the kind of message that would be welcomed with opened arms by friends that Rasputant had left behind, and he made a bee line for none other than Iliador awash in the glow of victory, the mad monk welcomed Grigory to his monastery on the Volga, and they hit the road as a kind of double act. Soon enough, they were trailed by supporters as they went from town to town together.

The documents tell us that sometimes it was dozens and sometimes it was hundreds of women who followed in their wake. Iliodor introduced Rasputin as his beloved brother. For his part, Grigory recounts his adventures in Palestine in a particularly nationalistic mode. Here's more from Douglas Smith. He had nothing but horrible things to say about the other branches of the Christian faith.

And he came to believe that pilgrimage to the Holy Lands should be encouraged among Russian society as a way of instilling greater faith in the Church, and by extension, and by instilling greater faith and loyalty among Russian Orthodox believers and subjects of the Crown in the sanctity of the throne itself. That this was a way you could further bind Russians to the autocracy, was through these trips

to the Holy Land. And and he would come back and speak about his experiences there, and this definitely sort of gave him a greater sense of religious authority in the eyes of his believers. When they ended their speaking tour back at Eliodor's monastery, the monk gave rasput And a lavish send off. It seemed to Grigory that their friendship was secure and that he had made a successful return to Russian society. Maybe he even believed that the bad press and the bad days were behind him. He

was friends with Eliodor and friends with the Czar. What could go wrong. But if he only saw smooth sailing ahead, then he hadn't been paying attention to the way that Eliador treated his friends, So it seems Gregory didn't have his guard up. A few months later, when he arrived in St. Petersburg, he heard that Eliodora was also in the capital, purchasing a printing press for his monastery. Eliodor invited Grigory to travel with him to meet with a

member of the Holy Synod, their supporter, germy Jin. Naturally, Rasputin agreed, but he was walking into a trap. When the pair arrived, they found that germy Jan was not alone. As they stepped into the room, Gregory realized that he was also faced by two other men, a Cossack officer who was one of Eliodora's violent monarchist allies, and another man, Mitya, who Gregory knew well. In fact, Resputin and Mitya had

spent quite a lot of time together. They were fellow mystics, fellow holy fools in the eyes of many, and had been friends for long enough to know that they hated each other. So when he stepped into the room with them, Gregory finally realized what he was in for. He tried to reach tread out the door, but they grabbed him and forced him into a chair, and they laid into him. If the Prime Minister had tried to make Resputant back down by threatening him with a few documents, this crew

took a more direct, more violent approach. As Iliodor would later tell the story, they took turns screaming and Rasputant's face about his sins. He had deceived them, he had fooled everyone. He was an impostor, a hypocrite, and a predator, and now he deserved to be condemned. Resputant tried to answer back, but this wasn't a conversation. Germy Jan, dressed in his priestly robes, grabbed Resputant by the head. In his other hand he held a gold cross and he

smashed it down on Resputin. He called him a devil. He hit Grigory again and commanded that he never again entered the Imperial Palace. Another blow fell, and he forbade Grigory to ever meet with the Empress, and the beating went on. It's a dramatic story. Eliodor said that Resputant left the room that night, shaking, pale and covered in blood, promising that he would never enter the Romanov's palace again.

He kissed an icon pressed on him by German Jin to seal the promise, and dragged himself out into the night. The Cossack officer remembered it a bit differently. He told other government officials that Resputant had fought all three of them before overpowering them and escaping into the street, swearing revenge. Whether it went one way or the other, one thing is clear. In an instant, Eliador and Resputant had gone from allies to enemies. Iliodor was hot off the heels

of his very public victory. He knew he was on the rise, and he felt untouchable all along. To this point, Rasputin had been the one standing between him and the Romanovs. It seems the Iliador thought he could finally do away with Grigory and step into his place. And powerful men in the church, like German Jin, saw Rasputin as a stain on their religion. They were only too happy to turn Eliodor against his fellow preacher. But if they had been able to turn the tables on the Tzar, they

found that Resputant would be a tougher target. In fact, their attack on Gregory backfired. Just a month later, German Jin got news he was being stripped of his position in the church after being booted from the Holy Synod. He was exiled from the capital, and of course he had been Eliodor's strongest ally. With him gone, the other members of the Holy Synod came for the terrorist preacher. Exile orders came down, and so did the command that

he was no longer a monk. Iliodor was defrocked. On the way out the door, both men pointed their fingers at Grigory. All of this was retaliation for their attack on him. It's more likely that their battle with the Czar and the Church, the battle they thought they won, was finally catching up with them. But regardless, they had no trouble blaming their defeat on Resputin, and in his fury at having the tables turned on him so severely,

Eliador decided to make his final play. He would unleash the weapon he had kept under wraps and finally drive a wedge between Resputant and the Czar. The letters were stolen. They had been prized possessions, after all, they came from the Empress, along with the shirt that she had sewn for him. It was her letters that had the most meaning for Gregory. In them, she poured out her prayers, her fears and her joys, the struggles of her chronic pain,

the uncertainty of life in the Russian court. It was all stitched together in the messages that she would send to her personal friend and spiritual adviser at his home in Siberia, built with the money given to him by his many followers. Grigory gave these gifts from the Empress a place of pride, and, by some accounts, in a moment of weakness or arrogance, he would take them out of his desk and show them off, like the time in nineteen o nine when his friend Iliador visited him

in Pokrovsko. It was just after the first time that Rasputin had arranged for Eliador to meet with the Empress. With the fires of conflict burning low, Grigory had invited Iliador out to his home in Siberia to retreat and think over what came next. The precise details of the visit are unclear, and the only person to describe what happened is Iliodor. Knowing the way he later turned on Rasputin. He's far from a reliable source, but he describes the

trip to Siberia as a revealing one. He says that as they traveled into Grigory's hometown, Rasputin told him wild stories of his degenerate youth and boasted constantly of his close ties with the royal family. He bragged that his influence went beyond the spiritual. They consulted with him about faith and love, yes, but also about the Duma, the ministers,

the government, the future of Russia. Eliodor writes that Rasputant got so boastful in his claims that he even said that Nicholas and Alexandra had bowed at his feet, and that the Czar could not even breathe without him. Now we have to take all of that with the grainess alt Iliodor wrote it down after he and Rasputin had become enemies. But what does seem to be true is that at some point on their visit, Rasputin showed Iliador

the letters. Some were from Alexandra, some were from the Romanov children, and there were notes from other important people there too. And somehow, when Iliodor left Pakrosco, some of Rasputin's letters went with him, and a few years later Eliador's change of heart about Grigory made them a powerful tool.

Here's Douglas Smith to describe what happened next. Alexandra wrote to Rasputin at a moment of extreme grief and sadness and emotional distress, and which she talks about, You know, I'm only able to, you know, feel at peace and at ease when i can rest my head on your shoulder, when I'm in your presence, when I feel your warmth around me. And Eliador basically held on to this letter as as as a weapon to use against Resputin when

the time came, and he did just that. Copies of the letter were made, they spread throughout society, and it became the basis of this notion that there was a sexual relationship between Resputin and the Empress. There never was any such relationship. But again, this information was brought before for Nicholas, and he was presented with the actual letter, and he said, yes, this is Alexandra's handwriting, took the letter, put it in his destroyer and basically said, we will

not speak of these matters further. But the letter and its implications didn't stop with Nicholas. It reached the aristocratic salons, where rumors from palace maids had prepared the way for the worst interpretations of the letter to take hold, and it reached members of the Duma, the Russian parliament, where politicians who opposed the Czar saw the opportunity to revive the outcry against Rasputin as a way of weakening the already weak Romanovs. So once again, the truth behind the

letters almost didn't matter. What mattered was that it seemed to confirm the worst suspicions that were already in the air, and when it came to Alexander's private life. There were plenty of unanswered questions and court resentments that fed the flame. After all, Alexander had become a mysterious figure in Russian society. To the people around her, she seemed secretive and conniving, and in fact, she seemed to line up perfectly with their suspicions of people from outside Russia who took up

positions of power there. Apparently none of these malicious prejudices had gone away. Of course, looking back, we now know that at least part of why Alexandra often retreated from company in the Russian court was because she was in chronic pain and suffered through the illnesses that she dealt with year after year. We would hope for a little more generosity and a little more mercy from people living through the things she suffered, but there was none of

that in Imperial Russia. Here's Ellen rappaport to say a bit more time and again, I you know, I saw letters and comments or diaries from the girls or members of court. Oh, you know, the family would do to go to the theater or to something, and Alexandra would either drop out or go home early because she wasn't feeling well, and she was all the always the party pooper,

you know, the one who you know was indisposed. And so time again you see Nicholas taking his girls to the ballet or to the opera without their mother, and Alexandra just wasn't a present socially at all. Alexandra, time and time again the girls would say a little note so in their diaries, Oh, mother couldn't come down to lunch because she had a headache and she wasn't feeling very well. So much of the Empress's private life was

hidden from the eyes of even those nearby. In Iliadora's poisonous insinuations added to the rumors that filled in the blanks of it was a weapon that didn't just strike Resputing, even as Nicholas tried to blunt its edge, It hit

Alexandra too. It becomes part of the basis for the myth that not only is Resputing offering spiritual sucker emotional comfort, but that in fact he's engaged in a sexual relationship with the Empress, which then later grows metastasizes to the point that he's also sleeping with the daughters of Alexandra.

In fact, even gets one of them pregnant, and that there's talk that Alex Say, the heir to the throne, is in fact the bastard child of Resputing, and all the stuff just gets more outlandish and crazier as the

years progress. And for someone like her who preferred to keep her private life private, the lies were monstrous, They were appalling, and they were absolutely crucially damaging, because not only within Russia was she hurried, prided and demonized and feet should in ugly sexual cartoons with rasput and some of them quite pornographic. In fact, these were in circulation in Russia, but of course this spread across the Western

press in Britain and America. The gossip was appalling, you know, the talk that they were having a sexual relationship was utterly absurd, and when people ask me about it, I'll say, I'm just not going there because it's so ridiculous. But the trouble is all that scandal and gossip, and it was absolutely fetid based on the third fourth hand gossip and rumor and innuendo. There was not a grain of truth in any of it, but of course that kind of mudge if there's enough of it sticks in the end.

The letter it was taken as an admission of guilt. The fiction was taken as fact. It was undoubtedly false, but it unleashed a flood of anger and fury against the Romanovs and against Rasputin. It became the enduring thing that people remember umber about Grigory rest Sputin embedded right in the lyrics of the bony m song of his name, that he was the lover of the Russian Queen. The

Romanovs did what they could to answer the lie. They tried to claw back Alexander's reputation, but Eliodora's partying shot had struck home. The mad monk went on the run. He disappeared into the shadows, off the stage for a time, and yet the damage was done. Shots rang out. It was intermission at the opera house. Nicholas had taken two of his daughter's Olga and Tatiana, to see the Tale of the Czar Sultan. But he wasn't the only one. A revolutionary anarchist had come with murder on his mind.

He meant to change the shape of the Russian Empire with his revolver at close range, and he did it too. The bullets struck home and killed the prime minister stoy Leapin. Nicholas later remembered that stoy Leapin had turned and made a sign of the cross in the air. As he grew pale, blood was smeared on the right arm of his jacket. It took four days for the Tsar's right hand man to die. This was one more active violence

that was laid at Restputant's feet. The papers wondered whether Grigory had somehow been part of the plot of the assassination. It was pure fabrication, But what tragedies weren't being blamed on the holy man from Siberia. Nicholas was spurred into action. Things were spiraling out of control, so he threw caution to the wind. As publishers spun up the presses to run articles and booklets on the mystical sex maniacs supporting the Empress, Nicholas did everything he could to reverse the

concessions he had made in nineteen o five. In his eyes, the freedom of the press wasn't working. The attempts he made to allow for representative government were falling short. His Empress was being derided, his ministers murdered, and even monarchists were fighting against him. It was time to reassert his god given authority. It was time for violence. The Moscow branch of the Okrana rated the printing office where a book against Resputant was being printed. They smashed the presses,

seized the books, and shut down the operation. The author, with his original manuscript tucked away, went on the run. A message was sent to the governor of the city, silenced every mention of Restputan, not the barest whisper was allowed to reach the page. With the secret police rampaging

throughout the city, the governor agreed. Over the course of the next few months, stories about Resputant brought on harsh reprisals, but the voices of Russian writers had been set free by the edicts of nineteen o five, and it was far too late to cage them back up again. Publishers, determined to hold onto their new found freedoms, continued to print stories about Resputin, and the more the Tsar's forces attempted to silence those stories, the more certain the people

became grigory. Resputin, the devil of lust, had his grip on the Russian throne. That's it for this week's episode of Unobscured. Stick around after this short sponsor break for a preview of what's in store for next week. The throne was in danger, the Church was in danger, the very state of Russia itself. No revolutionary or foreign missionary had done what rest Sputin had done. The Imperial family was stained. A vestige of the dark Ages had risen up and taken the Czar of Russia into his hands.

That was the message that thundered out into the Russian parliament, the Duma, on March eighth of nineteen twelve. The speaker, Alexander Gukov, was a politician who had been working to reform the Russian government since the Revolution of nineteen o five. Now he was taking direct aim at the Czar, and

Nicholas took it personally. After all, this speech was in open defiance of his power, and in a time when the press and the Church and even the supporters of the Empire had gone against the crown, this was a new low. Unobscured was created by me Aaron Manky and produced by Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Josh Thane in partnership with I Heart Radio, with research by Sam Alberty, writing by Carl Nellis and original music by Chad Lawson.

Learn more about our contributing historians, source materials, and links to our other shows over at grimm and mild dot com, Slash Unobscured, and, as always, thanks for listening. The Boa