Rasputin: The Last Word

Mr. Radzinsky did an admirable work with this narrative of the infamous staretz. I have never believed in the melodramatic, historically accepted account of Rasputin's murder and he has confirmed my suspicions. Bravo to his exhaustive detective work in trying to unravel the mystery of that fateful night in the Yassoupov mansion. This is a book for the serious reader of the last Emperor's reign. It can be slow going in places, but there is a wealth of information contained within these pages. It became very clear why Prince Yassoupov's version of the events is highly questionable. A very provocative book!

This book is worth reading simply because of the new documentary evidence in the file that Radzinsky unearthed. In the immortal words of Mikhail Bulgakov (in _Master and Margarita_), "Manuscripts don't burn." The evidence in the file offers compelling support for the author's conclusions about the most likely facts regarding Rasputin's dramatic life and still more dramatic death. Finding such source material must be every historian's dream.Because Radzinsky has a playwright's rather than a historian's sensibility, however, the book is frequently a frustrating read because he doles the new information out to us bit by bit, amongst other solidly researched but more conventional materials. Therefore I recommend this book without hesitation but warn the prospective reader that the book can be slow going. Persevere.

I snatched this book off the shelf as soon as I saw it and I wasn't disappointed. This is the first book on Rasputin that actually makes him a flesh-and-blood human being. The missing piece was his religious beliefs and the Old Believers his teachings originated in. The author had access to the police files on Rasputin and to interviews with some of his followers that add immeasurably to Rasputin's biography. Fascinating.

Once again, the author of "The Last Tsar" has given us an insight into the final years of the Romanov dynasty. I always felt, when reading other books about this era, that the character of Rasputin was somewhat one-sided, and reading in other works that there was a missing file piqued my interest. Now we have the File brought into the open after decades, and Rasputin stands revealed as a much more understandable person. His influence on the tsar and tsarina was strong, with unfortunate consequences for their family and country. The information set out in this book is fascinating, particularly the quotes from the interrogation of witnesses we have often read about, but never before had the chance to hear "speak". My one quibble is that, either the author or the translator has a quirky writing style, and the unusual grammar and sentence structure caught my attention initially, and kept interfering with my reading. Once I became accustomed to it, however, it faded into the background and didn't prevent me from thoroughly enjoying this book. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in early 20th century Russian history.

Edvard Radzinsky is like the character in the HG Wells story who has successfully built and operated a time machine. His chosen destination is the Court of Tsar Nicholas II and he inhabits that world like a native as anyone familiar with "The Last Tsar" knows. Radzinsky's readers become more like his traveling companion as he takes us through the former Soviet archives piecing his story together from first hand documents that no other author on this period has had access to. It is this ability to fuse the past with the present, so brilliantly done in the first book, that makes "The Rasputin File" equally intense and immediate. One example from many:"I received the last batch of unpublished documents about Rasputin in the Siberian archives. Among them was an inventory of property belonging to Rasputin immediately after his murder...I now knew every chair in his house and every glass on his table...Now I had seen what he saw. And I had heard his way of speaking, too, which had been left behind in his writings."I think the passage just quoted shows how Radzinsky's interest functions on a multiplicity of levels - a detective's love of uncovering the unknown; a scientist's fascination with minute detail; a mystic's compulsion to enter the very spirit of his subject, and even a portrait painter's need to capture as accurate a likeness as possible. Add to this the fact that the author is a Russian engaged in an act of almost public expiation for a National Crime and you have a work that packs an emotional charge far beyond the fantastic events of the story itself. The National Crime is, of course, the execution of the Romanovs. Despite the fact that the book focuses on Rasputin, it is their tragedy that underpins the narrative and the circumstances of their deaths are never far from the author's mind. As he demonstrated in "The Last Tsar" Radzinsky continues to be a master of the dramatic association, pulling together isolated events from the past and finding the common, often ironic, connection:"At the tsar's expense, a magnificent pavilion was erected over St. Simeon's shrine. And the procession of the cross...was headed by Father Ioann Storozhev. The same Ioann Storozhev, a priest from the city of Ekaterinburg, who two days before their execution in 1918 would celeberate holy communion with them and give them the blessing that would be their last." These books, and I consider "The Last Tsar" and "The Rasputin File" to be all of a piece, succeed as history, biography, drama, literature, and, on a subtler level, as a mystical exploration of the Russian character and soul. I hope Radzinsky will complete a trilogy with a work devoted to the Empress Alexandra.