Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned by Brian Moynahan - review by Beryl Bainbridge

Beryl Bainbridge

Not Too Bad

Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned

By

Aurum Press 400pp £16.95
 

For a whole year, when I was twelve, I tramped every Friday night down the road and over the railway line to the home of a Mr and Mrs Criddle (he was a director of the sugar firm, Tate and Lyle), where I listened to numerous bearded visitors singing the praises of the USSR and discussing the historical figures who had shaped the great October Revolution. 

At Mr Criddle’s I learnt about Stalin (little Zozo), who had suffered a satisfactorily Dickensian childhood, his mother being a half-wit, his father a drunken brute, but things trailed off after that. Apart from Trotsky and the ice-pick, I never really warmed to Lenin or Kalinin or Dzerzhinksy.

I might even

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter