Rasputin | How Rumour Broke an Empire | Feat. Sir Antony Beevor
5/14/202639 min
How does a Siberian peasant mystic end up controlling the most powerful empire in Europe? Could the rumours that destroyed a dynasty have been entirely false — and did they matter anyway? And, without Rasputin, would there have been no Lenin — and would the 20th century have looked completely different? Peter sits down with Sir Antony Beevor — bestselling author of Stalingrad, Berlin, and D-Day — to dig into his new book on one of history's most mythologised figures: Grigori Rasputin, the Siberian wanderer who charmed the Tsarina, antagonised everyone else, and whose murder was so catastrophically bungled it reads like black farce.
0:00 From Siberia to the Imperial court — how a peasant mystic reached the centre of power
5:30 Holy fools, wandering pilgrims, and why Russia was always fertile ground for figures like Rasputin
10:00 The voice, the eyes, and the seduction: how Rasputin actually worked on people
13:00 The Tsarina's obsession — and why Antony Beevor is certain the rumours were fake news
17:30 How Rasputin's ministerial choices set the railways on fire and sparked a revolution
24:00 Rasputin was right about the war — and then made everything worse anyway
27:30 The assassination: poisoned cakes, Yankee Doodle, and a murder plot of spectacular incompetence
32:00 Putin, Nicholas II, and why historians should be wary of historical parallels
36:00 Without Rasputin, no Lenin? The counterfactuals Antony loves but won't fully follow
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TikTok: @legacy_productions
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First 90 secondsPeter Frankopan· Host0:00
Today's guest on Legacy is one of the world's most acclaimed historians and writers, whose books have shaped how millions understand war, revolution, and the collapse of political systems. Sir Antony Beevor is a friend of mine, but also the best-selling author of works including Stalingrad, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, D-Day, The Battle for Spain, and Russia: Revolution and Civil War nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty one. His books have been translated into dozens of languages, won major international prizes, and has earned Sir Antony a reputation for combining extraordinary archival research with a novelist's eye for drama, atmosphere, and character. In his new book, Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs, Antony turns to one of the most infamous and misunderstood figures of modern history, Grigori Rasputin, the Siberian peasant, mystic, healer, charlatan, political operator, and holy man whose name became synonymous with decadence, corruption in the final years of Imperial Russia before the revolution. But the book is not just a biography of Rasputin himself. It's also the story of a regime losing confidence, of a royal family isolated by war, by paranoia, and of how gossip, scandal, and conspiracy can bring down one of Europe's oldest and greatest dynasties. At the heart lies a larger question that feels strikingly modern, too, about what happens when political systems become detached