Rasputin is well known as the evil monk who allegedly exerted a hypnotic influence over the last Tsar of Russia – and his family – but was then murdered by jealous aristocrats. A familiar enough story! But was Rasputin an LGBT holy man? Did he have a gay relationship with a Russian prince? And was he murdered because that love affair turned sour? The evidence is stronger than you might think…
Trigger warning: There is an image below of the dead Rasputin taken at the time of his murder.
Death of Rasputin – stabbing, shooting, poisoning, etc
Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916) encapsulates the decadence of Russia’s Tsarist empire before the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 swept it away. A charlatan who mesmerised the royal family, exploiting their personal weaknesses for power and financial gain. There had always been holy men hanging around the tsars for centuries but in the early years of the 20th century, his presence at the royal court seemed like a medieval throwback to the tsar’s enemies.
Rasputin enjoyed the confidence of Tsar Nicholas II but to others he was a filthy peasant, despised by the nobility as a low-born fraud.
From 1906, he acted as a faith healer to the young prince Alexei who was destined to become Tsar on his father’s death. At least, that was the plan. But there was a problem. The boy had inherited the ‘royal disease’ of hemophilia, which was carried by women in the family and passed on to men. Queen Victoria had been the super-carrier passing it on to umpteen daughters who then spread it around the European imperial families. Basically, if poor little Alexei was cut or bruised, he could not stop bleeding. The genetic condition hampered his ability to form clots. The constant threat was that he would bleed to death.
Rasputin appeared to stop the Tsarevich’s bleeding through a combination of hypnotism and prayer. In reality, sheer desperation made people see what they wanted to believe. There was no medical cure so Rasputin was the best thing on offer. In addition, he became a therapist to the Tsar and Tsarina, assuring them they were doing a great job and Russian could never do without them. Even if there were bread riots and a simmering revolution outside the palace windows.
Russia joined the First World War in 1914 getting a hammering from the Germans and Austrians on the eastern front. The discontent within the army found a focus on Rasputin, who soldiers imagined was having a lusty affair with the hated Tsarina. Rasputin was certainly having a marvellous time getting drunk and consorting with aristocrats and prostitutes.
Prince Yusopov decides that Rasputin must die!
A group of Russian nobles, in 1916, led by Prince Felix Yusopov (1887-1967), decided to kill Rasputin, inviting him for cakes and wine. The cakes were laced with potassium cyanide but somehow failed to kill him. Then he was shot several times but fought back. Finally, he had to be drowned to finish off the job.
Rasputin’s daughter, Maria Grigorievna Rasputina (1898-1977), disputed this entire account. She saw it as an attempt to make her father look inherently evil as well as generating ghoulish publicity for a book written by Yusopov in 1927 titled: Rasputin – His Malignant Influence and his Assassination. By that time, imperial Russia had been overthrown by the Bolshevik revolution and Yusopov was touring Europe with his tales.
Despite Yusopov’s attempt to portray the killing as a heroic deed for Mother Russia – most commentators saw Yusopov and his homicidal buddies as preening, spoilt dilettantes whose noses had been put out of joint because Rasputin wielded more influence at court. This was petty rivalry and nothing more.
The 1917 Revolution and the daughter of Rasputin flees
In 1917, the Romanov dynasty of Tsars was overthrown and by the end of that year, Russia had become a communist state: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). There was an attempt by “white” Russians to overthrow the “red” rulers of the USSR in a civil war, backed by many western powers, but it failed. Many White Russians then fled to London, Paris, and the United States. Maria Rasputin ended up in Paris.
While in the French capital, Maria was approached by Satanists and Diabolists demanding she share her father’s magical secrets. A group of wealthy Russian exiles calling themselves The Black Twelve even threatened to kidnap and torture Maria until she yielded her occult knowledge. The notorious British occultist Aleister Crowley was living in Paris at the time and some believed he was circling Maria, planning some kind of move on her.
Maria eventually made a public declaration that she had no secret wisdom to impart and wished to be left alone to lead a normal life. Well, not very normal. She ended up becoming a circus lion tamer on the grounds that she had been caged with Bolsheviks at some point in Russia – and they were wild animals. So lions didn’t faze her.
DISCOVER: The eight assassination attempts on Queen Victoria!
Rasputin – LGBT monk in a gay relationship?
In 1977, not long before her death, Maria made the astonishing and unverifiable claim that her father had been murdered for resisting a homosexual seduction by Prince Yusopov, who had died ten years earlier in 1967. So, he was not around to challenge this allegation. Of course, this can be seen as a crude attempt by Maria to smear Yusopov who she detested for making her father look like a crazed madman.
Up until then, she had pushed back against Yusopov’s rather over-the-top account of her father’s murder requiring multiple weapons with nothing seeming to work. But in 1977, Maria she accepted that her father had indeed been poisoned, shot, and drowned – though she now added raped, beaten, and mutilated with a knife. The assailant was the prince, driven mad by homoerotic passion.
So, was Yusopov gay?
My research into newspaper coverage of Yusopov in the 1920s and 1930s reveals that he was depicted as a dissolute young man. One journalist who met him in Paris in 1930, where he was trying to set up a “dressmaking establishment”, was mystified by this “delicate young man with the pale face and slender hands”. The reporter had been expecting Rasputin’s killer to be a tough Russian carrying bombs and with a dagger between this teeth – not the effete character he encountered.
As a former journalist, I can spot when fellow journalists are sending out signals on somebody’s sexuality. Even in another era. An artist’s impression of Yusopov in a 1930 newspaper article has him “lolling” on a chaise longue “clad in black satin pajamas (sic), a scarlet sash about his waist”. The image is below and speaks volumes to me. Yes – he was married to a woman – but we all ought to know these days, that proves nothing!
Yusopov had been asked to move on from other European cities as he was found to be “objectionable”. This was put down to “pranks and escapades” and the prince had been asked to leave London after several months: “He had been requested with due formality, but with firmness, to withdraw the light of his presence, said presence being considered by the authorities as not conducive to harmony and peace.” What on earth was that supposed to mean? It’s all very vague in the report.
Rasputin and Yusopov – consenting relationship?
To clarify matters, we have the blunt testimony of Grand Duke Nicholas Mikhailovich (1858-1919), shot by a firing squad on the orders of Lenin after the Russian revolution. In his diaries, the Grand Duke was in no doubt that Yusopov and Rasputin were in a homosexual relationship. He was writing shortly after Rasputin’s murder:
“I’m convinced there were physical manifestations of friendship in the form of kisses, mutual touching, and it may be, even something more cynical. Rasputin’s sadism is not open to doubt. But just how great Felix’s carnal perversions were is still little understood by me, although before his marriage there were rumours in society about his lasciviousness.”
So far from Rasputin turning down a gay seduction, as his daughter argued, her father had already been in a same-sex relationship but things for some reason soured. Presumably, Yusopov put the survival of the royal dynasty first and with his friends decided that his former lover had to go.
In 1932, Hollywood brought out a movie depiction of the infamous killing: Rasputin and the Empress. The character of Prince Paul Chegodieff was clearly based on Yusopov. He and his wife successfully sued Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer because in the movie Rasputin was shown seducing Yusopov’s wife. Presumably the joke behind closed doors was that Rasputin had seduced the other spouse!
Rasputin’s daughter pursues Yusopov
For decades, Rasputin’s daughter pursued a vendetta against Yusopov – sometimes below the radar and on occasions, talking to journalists. She only met him face to face on one occasion after the 1917 revolution. Maria made a trip to Paris and walked past Yusopov’s mansion. As luck would have it, he was at the front of the house, tending his garden.
In a 1966 interview, she said that he looked up suddenly and asked: “Don’t I know you?”. To which Maria answered: “You should – you killed my father”. By 1966, the lion taming had been dropped and Rasputin’s daughter was living on a mix of social security, teaching Russian, and babysitting. Attempts to sue Yusopov for damages over her father’s murder proved to be unsuccessful. She died in 1977.
