In 1916, the third year of Europe's Great War, Grigory Efimovich Rasputin the “mad monk” from Siberia, who had gained access to the Tsar’s family as a faith-healer, was brutally murdered in St. Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia.
A clique at court was blamed for the crime but although its members fed him large amounts of potassium cyanide, bashed in his head with a heavy candlestick, stabbed and shot him, none of them actually did the killing. That was done by a young British Cavalry officer sent from London; he shot Rasputin in the head as the bleeding coatless cleric fled into the freezing night. The British government had anticipated that the Russian amateurs would need help. London wanted Rasputin dead because his pacific influence on Tsar Nicholas II was raising the possibility of a unilateral Russian withdrawal from World War I, and that would have been disastrous for Britain.
A clique at court was blamed for the crime but although its members fed him large amounts of potassium cyanide, bashed in his head with a heavy candlestick, stabbed and shot him, none of them actually did the killing. That was done by a young British Cavalry officer sent from London; he shot Rasputin in the head as the bleeding coatless cleric fled into the freezing night. The British government had anticipated that the Russian amateurs would need help. London wanted Rasputin dead because his pacific influence on Tsar Nicholas II was raising the possibility of a unilateral Russian withdrawal from World War I, and that would have been disastrous for Britain.
