In 1999, Antony Beevor published Stalingrad, his account of the nihilistic battle between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that was a pivotal event in the second World War. The story combined high-level military strategy, as befits Beevor, a former British army officer, with the pitiless terror visited on the victims of one of the largest and most important battles in history. It was an international bestseller and brought military history into the mainstream of non-fiction publishing.
His next book, Berlin: Downfall 1945, about the Battle of Berlin, which ended the war in Europe, drew on archival sources in Russia that had been shut during the Cold War. These were opened up for a brief period after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.
Beevor’s book, which depicted countless rapes and other atrocities carried out by the Red army, was a direct affront to the Russian self-image of noble fighters who liberated the world from Nazi tyranny.
The author’s approach had been only to quote Russian eyewitness sources of the war back at the Russian public. But Russians did not like this version of their history. The country’s ambassador to London, Grigory Karasin, described Beevor’s account as one of “lies, slander and blasphemy”.
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Beevor cannot return to Russia, where he risks jail for his lèse-majesté approach to the Great Patriotic War, as it is known there.
But this did not deter him from returning to one of his favourite themes. Russia: Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921 was published in 2022, followed now by Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs.
The story of the Siberian peasant with the mesmeric charm who found himself at the centre of the Romanov court has been told many times and in many different ways. Pop group Boney M even had an international chart topper with the song Rasputin in the late 1970s.
Beevor’s approach to Rasputin is to rescue his subject from being a figure synonymous with historical gossip to one who truly changed the arc of history, and not for the better.
“As Kerensky, the leader of the provisional government said after the February Revolution, without Rasputin, there would have been no Lenin,” Beevor stated.
The Kerensky in question is Alexander Kerensky. He was the leader of Russia’s provisional government between the revolution of February 1917, which ended centuries of tsarist rule under the Romanov dynasty, and the second revolution that year, in October, which brought the Bolsheviks to power and inaugurated the Soviet regime.
In the brief hiatus between those revolutions, there was the tentative promise of turning Russia into a western-style democracy with free elections, freedom of the press and unions, and a police force based on consent. Still, the provisional government struggled for control and did not help its cause by continuing Russia’s involvement in the deeply unpopular first World War.
Its efforts were brutally pre-empted by the Bolshevik takeover. Russia and the rest of the world are still living through the reverberations.
Beevor’s central thesis is this: Rasputin’s proximity to the Russian royals created such an erosion of trust that when riots broke out in St Petersburg over food shortages and mass unemployment in February 1917, nobody in the country’s establishment was prepared to lift a finger to save the Romanovs.
Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra’s embrace of Rasputin was directly related to the haemophilia which afflicted their fifth-born child and only son Alexei, the tsarevich, as the heir to the Russian throne was known.
The very idea that the tsar of all the Russians being cuckolded by a Siberian peasant did more to shatter confidence in the tsar than anything else
— Antony Beevor
The “English disease”, as it came to be known, was a heritable condition that afflicted the male children of many of queen Victoria’s descendants, among them Alexandra and her sister Irene, who both had sons who were haemophiliacs.
German-born Tsarina Alexandra was a stranger in a strange land when she married Nicholas in 1894. She initially refused to give up her Lutheran faith to embrace Russian Orthodoxy, but once she did so she embraced it with the zeal of the convert.
All her attentions were visited on her sickly son, on whose fate the continuation of the Romanov dynasty – which had ruled Russia since 1613 – was dependent.
Rasputin was born in Siberia in 1869. In the strict hierarchies of Russian society, he should have been nowhere near the royal family. But he developed a reputation as a shaman and a wandering holy man. This was how he found himself in St Petersburg in 1906.
The Romanovs turned to Rasputin in desperation in the autumn of 1907, when the tsarevich fell and hurt himself. His panicked doctors could do nothing for the boy but Rasputin remained by his side, speaking to him in a calm, reassuring voice. He recovered and the tsarina’s belief that Rasputin was sent by God was compounded five years later when he similarly intervened, after Alexi, who had been given the last rites, recovered so well that even his doctors were baffled.
“The empress from that point on was convinced he was a saint, that it was the word of God speaking through Rasputin,” Beevor explains.
“And this was something which neither the tsar nor the courtiers around could do anything to control from then on. It is a central moment in the whole book.”
The outbreak of the first World War accelerated the end of the Romanov dynasty. Tsar Nicholas II’s disastrous decision to go to war, against, it must be said, the advice of both his wife and Rasputin, would eventually lead to the family’s ignominious end at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1918.
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By that stage Rasputin was already dead, murdered in December 1916 by members of the Russian nobility who were jealous of his access to Alexandra.
Beevor believes Rasputin, for all his well-documented licentiousness, was an original victim of “fake news”.
The rumour was put around that he was having an affair with the tsarina, one given credence in a letter Alexandra sent to Rasputin. It was stolen by one of Rasputin’s many enemies and circulated to the Russian press. “My soul is calm and I can rest only when you, my teacher, are seated next to me, and I kiss your hands and lay my head on our blessed shoulders.”
Beevor believes, as most historians do, that their relationship was entirely platonic.
“But the point was that in a patriarchal society like Russia, the very idea that the tsar of all the Russians being cuckolded by a Siberian peasant did more to shatter confidence in the tsar than anything else,” he says.
“It was almost like a great big stone dropped in the water and it sort of rippled outwards in the effect that it had in Russia, even within Europe itself.”
Beevor’s book pulls at the threads of history. Without Rasputin, there would be no Lenin. And without Lenin, there would be no Russian civil war, a war so terrible it fuelled the rise of fascism. Without Rasputin, there would be no Stalin – and so on to the present day with another autocrat, Vladimir Putin, in charge.
Russia seems to be a country that never learns from its history, I suggest to Beevor. The historian agrees. “No country is as much a prisoner of its own past as Russia. Being a prisoner of the past is one of the reasons for their great inability to change,” he says.
“Russia has produced such brilliant minds, such brilliant artists, writers, painters, and so forth. But they are, I am afraid, a tiny, tiny, tiny minority. The truth has no standing or respect in Russia whatsoever. They have what they call objective truth, which of course is not truth at all.
“Our mistake is always going to be we suffer from a democratic confirmation bias. We can only see the world through our democratic ideals, and find it almost impossible to understand the mentality of dictators and autocrats. And we get it wrong every single time.
“I have a story in my previous book about the wife of the duke of Devonshire who goes to Russia in 1902 and asks the tsar, ‘Why can’t you have some form of democracy in Russia?’ And the tsar said: ‘Russia is 200 years behind the West in that particular way and so democracy in Russia is impossible’
“It’s also, let’s face it, the sheer size of the Russian empire, which means they have to have a central autocracy controlling the whole thing. So there’s the fear of encirclement, which is sort of combined at the same time with a fear of disintegration and chaos.”
At the time of our interview, Russia is about to embark on its spring offensive in Ukraine. The subsequent casualty figures are staggering. For the first three days, March 17th-20th, the Ukraine general staff has reported 5,000 Russian troops killed and wounded. That is on top of the estimated 1.2 million Russian casualties since the war began four years ago.
Yet the architect of this devastation, Putin, remains in power and there are no riots in the streets as a consequence. How can a modern society put up with such casualty figures, for no discernible gain?
“It’s not so much just a question of just dealing with the casualty figures, which you mentioned, which you’re quite right [about]; it is this idea that conspicuous cruelty is an essential weapon of war,” Beevor replies.
“And that goes back to the Mongols. Now, that was the same idea in medieval Europe. It even continued into the wars of religion in the 17th century, which were just as appalling as anything happening in Russia. But the change came in Europe with the Enlightenment in the 18th century, with much more of an attitude of respect for soldiers and for their suffering.
“And then we have the invention of the Red Cross and the Geneva Convention. None of this touched Russia at all. And this is the great difference. Russia believes in treating its own soldiers almost as badly as the enemy.”
In recent weeks there were febrile rumours that a coup was being planned against Putin. The Russian dictator reportedly disappeared for a number of days and mobile internet was cut off in Moscow and St Petersburg. Still, the threat seems to have been dissipated.
Could Putin suffer the same fate as Nicholas II, I ask Beevor. “I spend my time as a historian trying to fight historical parallels. Above anything else, there cannot be popular revolution like the February revolution,” he replies.
“In Russia, Putin has surrounded himself with 27 different security organisations and services partly because he believes in dividing rule.”
Beevor recalls the fate of two Russian opposition figures: Alexei Navalny, killed by poisoning in 2024 while serving a prison sentence in an Arctic penal colony, and Boris Nemtsov, shot dead in 2015 within sight of the Kremlin.
“Even if another Navalny or – even better – another Nemtsov was to appear as a sort of democratic candidate, they wouldn’t stand a chance. They would be killed very, very quickly.”
Antony Beevor’s Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs is published by W&N priced €15.99.
