On This Day: The Assassination Of Rasputin
It's been a long year, and it's almost over.
One hundred years ago on 30 December 1916, Grigori Rasputin, the Russian mystic who became a confidant of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, was brutally killed. After supposedly being poisoned, shot and beaten, he was thrown into the freezing waters of St. Petersburg’s Neva River by aristocrats fearful of the influence he wielded over the Romanov court.
The death of the ‘notoriously evil’ monk was reported in the Manchester Guardian on 3 January 1917, while the following day, amidst all the news about the war in Europe, it was noted that Russia could now breathe more freely.
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