It is now well over a century since Grigory Rasputin met his end, murdered just a few weeks before the February Revolution by a group of cack-handed conspirators who included a playboy aristocrat, a grand duke and a far-right politician. But this self-­created holy man from a village in western Siberia continues to exert his appeal on posterity. Antony Beevor is the latest to succumb, offering us a fast-paced account of Rasputin’s journey from obscurity to the heart of imperial power in St Petersburg and his subsequent career as confidant to the ruling couple.

The story is well worn, but Beevor brings out its salient aspects. He shows just how susceptible the imperial establishment was to a guru like Rasputin. The court of the early 1900s was in the grip of a spiritualist mania, while Nicholas and Alexandra had additional reasons to seek otherworldly validation: they maintained an unbending belief in both the tsar’s God-given right to rule and his deep connection with the Russian people, but their convictions were vitiated by insecurity and awkwardness. Nicholas came to the throne young and unprepared, while Alexandra was a foreigner with a tense and aloof personality who was never quite at ease in a high society that she came to see, not without reason, as a snake pit. Rasputin was not the imperial couple’s first special ‘friend’: a French hypnotist known as Monsieur Philippe had served as their all-purpose adviser in 1901–2, even accompanying the tsar in public on occasion. 

When Rasputin took over Monsieur Philippe’s mantle in late 1905, he quickly proved indispensable, providing succour and apparent healing powers to an imperial couple tormented by the haemophilia of their only son, Alexei. But Rasputin generated problems as well as solutions. He kept some unfortunate company, notably the rabble-rousing ‘Mad