Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned [Paperback]

Brian Moynahan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 24, 1999

Grigory Efimovich Rasputin—drinker, thief, womanizer—arrived in St. Petersburg in 1903 as if from the medieval past . . . tattered, black-clad, muttering. By the time of his sensational murder thirteen years later, the peasant was the ”beloved Friend” of Czar Nicholas and Empress Alexandra, with a seemingly supernatural power to stop the bleeding attacks of their hemophiliac son, Alexis. How could it have happened? As on society lady of the time asked, “How could so pitiful a wretch throw so vast a shadow?”Drawing on confidential police reports, cabinet meeting memos, and many documents only now available, Moynahan sheds new light on Rasputin’s life and disputes some of the widely held details of his death. The Washington Post Book World called the book “balanced and well-researched” hailed its “shrewd analysis of the ways in which Rasputin’s manipulative abilities meshed with the emotional needs of isolated, superstitious members of czarist aristocracy. It is an unforgettable portrait of an age as well as of a man.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

British journalist and historian Brian Moynahan does not spare details of the lechery and drunkenness that Rasputin brought with him on his journey from the squalor of rural Siberia to St. Petersburg, where he captivated the tsar and tsarina with his mysterious ability to ease their hemophiliac son's hemorrhages. Yet Moynahan also credits "the mad monk" with intelligence, generosity, even a weird spirituality. In elegant prose, he retells with panache the saga of an illiterate peasant's rise to a position of fearsome power in the waning days of the Russian monarchy. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In this biography of the most notorious peasant in Russian history, Moynahan (The Russian Century, LJ 3/1/95) moves through the extraordinary and mostly familiar story?this is at least the 12th biography?of the events leading to the fall of tsardom itself. Moynahan's style is racy, with the frequent use of four-letter words, and no piece of gossip has been overlooked. He argues that the imperial couple's own personality defects, and not their son's illness, made them particularly vulnerable to exploitation: "Rasputin was an accident waiting to happen." Certainly the reader is left in no doubt that Nicholas II and his wife, she especially, were the main authors of their own and many others' misfortunes. While hardly "a precursor of the modern superstar," Rasputin remains a lurid symptom of tsarism's rot, but not the diabolical cause of its ruin. As Moynahan makes clear, he was a simple man, fallible, uneducated, intensely human, caught up in fantastic and, even now, hardly believable circumstances. This makes for good, even juicy reading; recommended for all libraries.?Robert H. Johnston, McMaster Univ., Hamilton, Ontario
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Da Capo Press (December 24, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0306809303
• ISBN-13: 978-0306809309
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #790,004 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A sensationalised read, September 18, 2000

By 

Cybamuse (Fuzzy Europe) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned (Paperback)

The book started out mimicking the marvelous book by Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra, with Moynahan creating the atmosphere that Rasputin walked into. Right off the bat, it became clear that this book was based on the sources that include a more sensationalised account of Rasputin's life, and having read Edvard Radzinsky's book first, that made some things in this book a bit contradictory for me.

I think what threw me was in the middle of this book, Moynahan suddenly turned absolutely vitriolic and was shockingly scathing about Rasputin - and I really felt the obsenities were a bit over the top. There is no doubt Rasputin was just a wee bit manipulating and destructive in the actions he took to preserve his position as the Tsarina's right hand man, but I felt Moynahan drifted a bit there! A beautiful narration is one thing, obsenities are another and all rather lacked the nice professional tone that the book opened with.

However, towards the end of the book, Moynahan settled down again and got somewhere more polite about the whole tragic death. For all Rasputin did, he was just a focus of the frustration the people felt at the hardships being imposed upon them by a Tsar who seemed to be disconnected from his people. Moynahan did convey ratehr well that the prevailing atmosphere in which Rasputin was assisinated was one where you could tell it wasn't going to make any difference to the Russian Empire.

Its up to you whether you read this book - if you believe Radzinsky's sources for his book, then possibly his book is more accurate, however for a largely well-written book about Rasputin based on what the world knew for 70-odd years, this is a pretty good book (apart from the bit in the middle!)

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A gripping and sobering read, July 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned (Hardcover)

Rasputin is a figure pretty well everybody has heard of. The popular mind thinks of him as a drunken rake who got into the confidence of the Russian imperial family by a mixture of his guile and their predilection for religious fervour, coupled to their concern for their hemophiliac son and obsession with preserving the autocracy. As this gripping book tells us, that image is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Rasputin was also a devoted family man and did much to help a lot of people. Brian Moynahan makes a good job of showing us this in a steady narrative which only occasionally loses its footing and takes care to put this bizarre figure in context. There are weaknesses. The conclusions are crushed into a couple of pages and I would have liked more on what happened after Rasputin's death and the revolution which followed. But this is an excellent piece of work for anyone interested in Russia at the time. And if the book is sensationalist, well, Rasputin was sensational figure. He was instrumental, albeit possibly unwittingly, in bringing down one of Europe's grand old dynasties. You don't get much more sensational than that.

25 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Titilating Tale..., December 21, 2003

By 

Diane H.Fabian (Wisconsin, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned (Paperback)

...but worthless as a historical biography. This book is a collection of the most salacious gossip from the latter days of the Romanov Empire. It is both entertaining and gives some insight to the "mood" of St. Petersburg at that time, but is filled with "inaccuracies", from references to Rasputin's youth as a time of living in primitive poverty to refering to him as a monk to descriptions of a life style of unrestrained, wild debauchery. In fact, his father was a land owner, Rasputin grew up in a nice home in a town that benefited from being located by rivers (making commerce an important part of the town), was never a monk, remained married to the same woman, brought his two daughters to live with him in St. Petersburg so they could have an education, and for a complex set of reasons, allowed himself to be a scapegoat. While he admitted to "falling into sin", those incidents were a very small part of a very complex and interesting person/life.