The Rasputin Episode, Part One: A Young Mystic On The Rise

Ridiculous History is a production of iHeartRadio. Welcome back to the show, fellow ridiculous historians. Spoiler, this is a momentous occasion for several reasons. First off, it is the six year anniversary of our super producer, Max, the freight train Williams.

Six years old.

Yeah, not as a person on the show.

Oh, no, I came out of a vat six years ago and started making podcasts.

Fully formed, fully ready to pod.

Because we put most of our money into that grandfather clock for the Quister fight, and then we put the rest of it into a vat to grow Max Williams.

Matt technically is a pod person. We grew him from a pod into a pod person.

That's the legendary Mr. Noel Brown. They call me Ben Bullen for tax purposes. And we are going to spend the week here, Noel, delivering on something we did not think would ever happen. Now, my brother in podcast arms, you and I well recall– October 24th, 2017, when we finally figured out why British lawyers wear those crazy powdered wigs.

It wasn't a syphilis?

It was a syphilis.

It was either one of the two, possibly both.

Possibly both, possibly both. And we also together learned the term for those wigs. Peruk.

Peruk.

What a jolly and dignified term. Ben, it was around that time that we, because that being what?

Was that the first?

That was the very first one.

I guess that's why you brought it up. It would make sense given the circumstances.

That was right about the time or just after that we more or less okayed a logo that was presented to us featuring an archival and free-to-use image of Of a very spooky-looking man. And you'll recall, Ben, we tried to offer suggestions to zhuzh it up and ridiculify it a little bit. I think there was a version where he was wearing some, like, sunglasses or something.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Or a couple of other, you know, alt versions of it. But at the end of the day, you know, we had to make this show lickety-splickety. It was quite the homework assignment that needed to be completed yesterday. And so we didn't have much time to style on that logo. And like many things... The rest was history. Ridiculous history.

There we are.

And that's been our logo for, how long has.

It been, Lothi? Nine years.

I was going to say nigh on a decade.

One year short. Nine on a decade.

Yeah.

We thought we were in for a six-week tour, fellow Ridiculous Historians, and now here we are. It's your favorite, well, your fourth favorite, according to the ratings, History Podcasters. For years and years, as you said, Noel, we have subtly and not so subtly teased an episode about a certain controversial guy. And you, Max, Casey Pegram of yore, we have all received questions saying, hey, what's up with that logo?

And Noel, like you pointed out, you and I both essentially said, ah, we were in a hurry.

Sure. It's fine.

Yeah, it's fine.

Roll with it. Yeah, roll with it.

Because to your point, Ben, we were thinking this was going to be quite a short-lived thing, and now we are approaching a decade. And I do think it's funny, and very much in Ridiculous History style, that we're celebrating the ninth year anniversary of the show rather than the tenth year anniversary of the show.

Yes, and we're also technically celebrating celebrating the ninth year anniversary a week late. So, folks, if you are listening and you are in a place where you're not driving or operating heavy machinery, please check out the logo for our little show that could. The time has come. Folks, we've teased it. Can you guess who we are talking about?

It's that guy from that animated movie about the Russian princess.

He was the bad guy.

Yes, yes.

Spooky fingers. He was sort of a wizard type figure. Bit of a Rick Rubin type character.

Grigori Raspusin.

Yes. We're going to call him Greg for part of this. Or Grig.

Yes, or Grig.

What follows is peak ridiculous. And as we begin, we have to note the story of this Rasputin guy is kind of tough to parse because even during his own life, he was surrounded by rumors and legends and conspiracy theories. And he himself encouraged at least a few of those. So Noel, as you, Max, and I, and all the rest of us stroll through this guy's early days, we've got to do our best to point out where the information is lacking, where the theories compete, where some things are utter hogwash, or where it just gets super duper weird.

Yeah, and this is a guy that had a lot of power and a lot of control over the narrative about his own life kind of perception. So he did a lot of myth-making on his own that sort of stands up to the test of time.

Also, sorry to jump on you there. We just have to be clear that we are not, either of us, Russian speakers. So we're not going to do too many crazy voice yet, yet, yet to the yet. We are not going to do too many crazy, crazy voices.

Speak for yourself, Ben.

All right.

Well, you know what?

Yes, yes, yes. And a Merry Matryoshka to you, my friend. You love those matryoshka dolls. I do love them. They're efficient. They're efficient in the space. Right. So here we go. Our pal Greg is born Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin on January 24th, 1869. And he's born in a small Siberian village named Pokrovsky.

Can you do it better?

No. Yeah, yeah, there we go.

Ben, I don't know if I told you this.

I have certainly mentioned that my mom is an opera singer, but the one opera aria that I memorized in an authentic accent is a Russian one from the opera Eugene on Yegan by Tchaikovsky.

So my Russian accent is on point.

Nice, nice. And clearly authentic.

Absolutely.

Absolutely. At least in the operatic sense, yes.

So like most of the people in this village, Greg's family is of the peasant class, and life in Siberia has never been pleasant for peasants. We don't know a ton about his parents. We do know his father, Yefem, because we call it, I think, a patronym in this kind of naming thing. system. Yefimovich basically means son of Yefim.

And Yefim is a farmer. He's a church elder. He's a government courier. Let's go to you, Max.

I do just want to point out that I do think it's ironic that it is only one additional letter between pleasant and peasant, because it is kind of an oxymoron whenever we're talking about peasants.

It doesn't seem very pleasant. I just want to say that.

The pleasantries of the peasantries. No, I was thinking the same thing, Max.

I don't know if that's a Max, but the fact is.

A Maxervation is what that is. There we go.

I was also kind of in a rap phase.

Writing some of this.

You remain in your rap phase, my guy.

Thank you, man.

And you wear it well. Yes, indeed. So Yefimovich, right. Okay, so that's true, huh? Yefimovich is a– what is it?

Like a– Like son of.

Got it, got it, got it, got it. So you're right.

He was a farmer, church elder. He worked as a government courier, which meant that he– was he the messenger that might get shot?

I think he might have been.

He might have been, yeah. He essentially just moved people and– stuff back and forth between regional population hubs in that area of Siberia. Greg's mother is even more obscured by history. Her name is Anna. We do know that life was brutal out there. Most of Greg's Seven siblings, seven other siblings died either in infancy or early in childhood. Some historians are going to tell you that there was a ninth child who survived long enough to start her own family.

But either way you look at it, a lot of this guy's childhood is still a matter of educated guesses and assumptions. One of the primary assumptions being that if Greg is like most other peasants who were pleasant, living an unpleasant life in the area at the time, he probably grew up not going to school. He was probably illiterate for a while.

Well, he grew up going to the school of hard knocks, Ben. There we go. That's for sure.

Historians like Douglas Smith found local archival records that gave us just a little bit more insight into Greg's youth.

It would appear that he was a bit of a rapscallion, a troublemaker. A razor of hell.

He was a hard-drinking, petty, thieving, local authority, disrespecting young fella. And in fact, this would be one of the key pieces of information that would later lead to some of these, you know, more outsized legends concerning the man.

This idea that he.

was a horse-thieving, blaspheming, fault-witness baron team.

Yeah, yeah. We also have to shout out several books, which we'll do along the way. One of the first books we have to shout out is by a guy named Joseph T. Furman. It's called Rasputin, A Life. Also, the second book from Furman we have to shout out is his sequel to that book, Rasputin, The Untold Story.

We're getting a lot of this from these folks, from these historians.

I think Rasputin, A Life is a very lazy titling, just putting that out there.

Yeah, and I 100% agree with you, not just because we have a nine-year covenant to have each other's backs, but because you are objectively correct.

Rasputin, he was alive.

Yeah, you could put anybody's name colon a life and publish a book. I mean, I would be cool with like a life of, or a life in, but just a life.

Give me a break.

Right.

Right. Oh, let's do like life of Rasputin, like life of Brian. There we go.

There we go. Uh, life of Chuck. Wasn't that the, uh.

With the dancing guy?

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I quite liked that.

Well, what, what we do know is this it's, uh, 1886, uh, And our buddy Greg is 17 years old. He's tired of the village life in the hinterlands. And whatever you think about what happens to and from Rasputin later, it's pretty easy to agree with him here, you know. So he hits the road. He goes to a place called Abalok.

It's about 155 miles away, and that's where he meets Abalok. a young woman named Proskovia Dubrovina. She is also a peasant. She's super into him. She's like, oh my God, what a handsome, charismatic guy. They date for, get this, just a few months before they jump the broom, tie the knot, and get married in February of 1887. I feel like a courtship of just a few months before you get married is, I don't know, feels kind of crazy.

Ben, I know I've really missed my window for this, but I'm going to have to drop it just the same. Siberia is the Delaware of Europe.

Okay, ridiculous.

Why?

Nothing happens. Nothing happens there.

Nothing happens in Siberia.

Except tax havens or something. I don't know. Aren't there gulags in Siberia?

People always talk about scary Siberian prisons and the frozen tundra.

So it seems like that's where all the action is.

Yeah, Siberia is often portrayed as not being a, I mean, I would argue it's more of like, you know, the Iowa, the frozen tundra wasteland where no one wants to go to.

I'm just kidding. Iowa's wonderful. Maybe it's more like Ohio.

It's, wow.

Wow, you washed out the street for that one, Max.

Okay, I guess you got Delaware's back.

I think Delaware just has historically been, in this show anyway, the sort of stand-in for like a boring state.

Yeah, you're saying pretty much because of the the commonality in size, Siberia and Delaware are the same.

Well, fair enough.

I'm saying if we're talking about depression, misery, death and plain, straight boringness, Ohio is the comp.

Everybody is going to everybody is going to get a stray shot. in this, our anniversary episode.

I think we made a joke, actually, because remember, we've had three straight episodes where somebody.

Oh, you found a thing to hate.

That's what you're doing, Max.

I'm part of the crew.

All right, Max, bonus points to you if you can somehow bring Negging Ohio back over the course of these two episodes.

Have we done an Ohio episode?

We did.

We've definitely done Ohio.

All right, Max, I put to you the task of At some point telling us.

What episodes we did about Ohio and why they sucked.

Yeah, so we can play the sound cue. But also that doesn't count for bringing up Ohio organically later in the story.

No, I don't think so. Thank you, man.

Ground rules. Ground rules. So Dubrovina, her story is pretty sad. She is Rasputin's wife. for the rest of her life. And she and he moved back to his parents' hometown. And she stays there raising the kids all the while as Greg turns into Rasputin and rises to infamy, his later travels and so on. And she hears all these crazy rumors, but she is solely devoted to this guy until the day she passes away. And like so many other families in the area, the couple loses a lot of their children. They have seven kids, only three make it to adulthood. You got Dimitri, born in 1895, you got Maria, 1898, and you've got Varvara, born in 1900.

For sure.

And, you know, for a lot of folks at the time, life felt relatively predictable. People had their routines. Your parents were farmers or small business owners. You'd get married young, have children, join the family business, and then pass that on to the next generation, rinse and repeat. This had been the social, you know, structure really for centuries at this point. But Gregg or Gregg, old Gregg, He didn't see himself as an ordinary guy. He already was kind of starting to develop what one might call delusions of grandeur.

There we are. Yeah.

He's probably inspired by his father's heavily religious household and his upbringing. Greg finds an interest in religion, a renewed fascination. And so he temporarily leaves his family in his hometown in 1897 and And he goes on a pilgrimage, which was a thing people just did back then.

To where? To the Holy Land? To some site? Doesn't a pilgrimage require a destination?

It does.

And he had several pilgrimages, as we'll see. The history is kind of murky, Noel, because some historians, even now in 2026, say his 1897 field trip was entirely because he needed to skip town on those horse theft charges. Other people, and more historians agree with this, they will say that young Greg was struck with a vision, an epiphany, a revelation. He was visited by either the Virgin Mary or a guy named Saint Simeon of Vercuturie. I think I did all right on that.

I think you did just gloriously, Ben, more than all right. And this was the patron saint of the Urals? That's a mountain range, right?

Yeah, the Ural region.

And that's, for anybody who tuned into our patron saints conversations, you know that often a saint in Christianity is going to be the patron of multiple things. Saint Simeon is just the patron saint of this area. Other sources say claim that Greg was inspired to travel by a young theology student. And this person was named Meliti Zaborovsky. We have to throw that in there because of the later, darker stuff we're going to get into. So he left town either because he was accused of horse theft, had a religious experience, or got a little close with a young woman studying theology.

Well regardless of why he left it would appear that at this point the 28 year old uh greg we're going to start calling him rasputin at this point because he's beginning to he's going through his arch phase, right? He's starting to like, this is his, we're doing a.

Villain backstory kind of thing, or sorry, origin story.

I wouldn't say he's fully Rasputinified yet, but he's approaching it.

He's proto-Rasputin.

And he had some kind of criminal and or spiritual crisis is what we can surmise. So he decided he was going to change himself. He was going to take the steps to become a new man.

This was not his first pilgrimage.

In the past, he'd taken shorter little sojourns to places like the Holy Znamensky Monastery at Abilak and to Tobolsk's Cathedral. By his next pilgrimage, however, he was ready to level up. as far as pilgrimages and spiritual slash criminal awakenings go.

There we go. Well put, Noel. So our guy, our pre-Rasputin character, arrives at a place called St. Nicholas Monastery, and he is super-duper impressed and humbled by a guy named Makary, M-A-K-A-R-Y, just one name, like Cher, right? And this guy is awesome. kind of a Christian mystic.

Priest, kind of Matt, like wizard priest. I mean, there is a, yeah, we'll get to it.

Sorry.

I don't know when you jump the gun, but there is something that sets this, this role, this star at the side. We don't quite have an equivalent of it here. In the United States, in the forms of Catholicism and faith. Maybe, I don't know, I kind of find rabbis a little mystical, especially in the Orthodox faith.

So maybe, I don't know, maybe something along those lines.

Just because of the talismans they carry and the way they dress and things like that.

It has a certain amount of showmanship, let's call it.

Yeah, a certain amount of esoteric wisdom that is– gate kept hard. And on display.

Yeah.

And I say that with full respect to a couple of my rabbis, actually. And so, yes, we all know what that experience may feel like. I love that you're dropping the word starets. That is something that doesn't really have an equivalent in Christianity in the West, in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition. The best way to think of it is an elder, a mentor, a Yoda, a Jedi. Right.

And Rasputin kicks it at St. Nicholas Monastery for several months. Most historians believe this is where he learned to read and write. And he appreciated the education and the religious stuff definitely had a deep impact on him. But he did eventually leave.

Yeah, it just occurred to me too that, I mean, it would make sense that a lot of young, poor boys would be sent to monasteries to be educated because there were no other opportunities for that, right?

Yes.

Yeah, that's a great point. Also, he would later go on when he was full Rasputin, Rasputin actual, he would later go on to talk a lot of trash about the monastery. He said their life was too rigid. he said was coercive. He wanted to be a wild pony running free. But he would also say a lot of the monks at St. Nicholas were homosexual. And he said that as an insult, to be clear. Sure.

And I mean, you know, we know there's certainly a historical precedent for closeted gay men in priesthood. This seems to be a part of that continuum, though I'm not saying that he necessarily was telling the truth, but it wouldn't be unheard of.

Yeah.

What I think we're both saying here is that he was being kind of a jerk about it. Oh, yeah.

He was kind of a jerk.

Yeah.

Yes. Yes.

So whatever happened at St. Nicholas really made an impression on him. He returns back home to his village. But now this is a totally different story. edgier Greg. It's like when someone goes to New York and comes back smoking clove cigarettes. He looked kind of like a bum. He looked like a train kid, dude.

Bit of a beatnik. Yeah.

He decided to restyle himself kind of like you're saying, Ben, almost like in a hippie fashion, but sort of more of a square hippie. He became a vegetarian. He said he wasn't going to drink alcohol anymore.

He displayed signs of religious zealotry. There we go.

You know, these manic fits, these fugue states of prayer. He also knew that farming was absolutely not for him.

Yeah.

And his spouse stuck with him for the next several years. Greg, becoming Rasputin, is sort of a full-time hobo. The word for it at the time was strotic. which means something like pilgrim or a holy wanderer, he'd leave his hometown and his family.

Like Cain from Kung Fu.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would leave his hometown and his family for months at a time, for years at a time, and he would travel across the land visiting churches and monasteries, other holy sites, and at every step of the way, he was picking up fans everywhere. that became followers.

Yeah, he's out there proselytizing. By the early 1900s, he.

Had a bit of a cult going.

Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of family members and other locals from his hometown who followed him. When he was back in the area, a lot of these followers would pray alongside him, and this represented a bit of a schism in the village because his style of religion was starting to look a little different from theirs.

Yeah, yeah.

And he is still living in his father's house. And at the time, then as now, it's normal to live in an intergenerational household. He and his followers in the village built a secret chapel in the root cellar, and they held secret prayer meetings there. This did not feel right to the other villagers, especially, you guessed it, folks, the official local priest. This guy is understandably kind of peeved that there's new competition moving in.

Dude, he's eating their lunch, man. He's eating their wafers.

Yes, yes. He's transubstantiating the competition. So rumors begin to stir. And this is sort of the origin point of what will later lead to the death of Rasputin. Spoiler, folks. What?! Yeah.

No.

Well, we knew he was going to die eventually. This was a long, long time ago after all. So not too much of a spoiler, Ben.

We all die. All men die.

Well, just maybe not under such alarming circumstances.

Right, right.

I don't know. I have some mercury. I want to drink it. I'll be fine.

Max classic. I'll be fine.

No, no.

Side note, the Ohio episode that I have written down, and there's probably more. Once I find one, I write it down. The one I've written down is, That time Ohio and Michigan almost went to war.

Isn't that funny? Because you, if I'm not mistaken, Max, are quite fond of Michigan.

That is my birth state, and hence why a lot of my hatred for Ohio comes from there.

Is this football-based hatred, Max? Ohio is the fuck I do.

There's many things, but I do have a University of Michigan banner right in the back.

One of the beautiful things about this nation of ours is is that every single state in the union picks a state adjacent to them to hate.

Well, the thing about Michigan is, to quote John Oliver, Michigan, the giant mitten holding back Detroit from.

Fighting all of Canada. Because that's just how Detroit is.

But also, why is Michigan one state? Geographically, it should be two.

Well, that's just like your opinion.

You should geographically be too, Ben.

We should, we should. Thank you.

You know what?

Overdue, but it's the anniversary episode. Can we play a max with the facts on that?

Yeah.

So back to the story in Rasputin's hometown, the folks who don't jibe with him, including the local priest, are spreading these salacious, juicy rumors. They're saying, look, Greg's female followers are bathing him before each meeting and bathing him hard. Whoa.

Talk about salacious, like heavy petting? What are we talking about? Okay. Yeah, I got it. Yeah, I mean, he is.

He does seem to be cultivating a bit of like a sex magic kind of vibe.

Jared Leto will later try to do something similar.

Bro, there's a documentary that's coming out about Jared Leto.

I saw like a trailer for it and it is bad.

I mean, the accusations against that man, that's not a good dude.

Yeah. And Rasputin, even way back in the late 1800s, is getting hit with accusations like this There's also a Lovecraftian rumor going around, and people in the village are saying, look, if you walk by at night, you can hear the group singing these blasphemous songs, and we don't know what they're saying, but we know it's not Christian. And then some people argue that Rasputin is a secret spy for a very divisive cult called the Christi.

Right, which is another super secret underground mystical sect of Christianity dating back to the 1600s. This last rumor really did kind of line up with some of the others because the Christi also had some pretty bizarre, as I was implying, accusations against them.

They weren't really Christian at all.

They were basically doing like blood sugar sex magic.

Yeah. Including cannibalism and self-flagellation.

This would be like the bad guy in a Dan Brown novel. You know, the spooky monk that's going around beating himself with reeds while trying to pilfer sacred artifacts in order to take over the world.

Yeah, yeah.

And that they were also having orgies. So they're beating themselves up. They're eating each other. They're not really Christians.

No, that was, you know, I'm thinking these guys might not actually be so Christian.

Right, right.

This behavior does not.

Yeah, clutch your pearls. As we know, and Max, we have to have at least one beep in this episode. As we know, this was pretty much bullshit. Most historians. There we are. Most historians now agree that these rumors of Rasputin being a clished were unfounded gossip. And it's easy for us to dismiss it immediately out of hand today.

But no, you and I know if you've ever lived in a small town, you've seen how quickly locals can grasp on to the most flimsy of rumors. And we hate it, don't we? When facts get in the way of a good story.

Boy, do we have, right? I mean, think about it, though.

Like, the dude was definitely starting to exercise some undue influence against the status quo of the church, and it would seem that being associated with this sect would be, like, kind of the ultimate nail in the coffin of, like, trying to discredit a holy man.

So you got to think.

That it's, whether or not this exact thing was true, we know we got up to some odd shenanigans.

It does make sense.

That this would be the kind of rumor that would be started by, like, the folk's you know, occupying the establishment of the church there in the community.

A hundred percent. So the tension is simmering and bubbling up in, in the guy's hometown. Despite this, Greg, who is becoming Rasputin continues to practice his show. and travel along. Other parts of Siberia heard about him, and sometimes they would hear, this guy's a sketchy cult leader and sex pest.

And sometimes they would hear, he is a true spiritual force, like he can talk to God. Either way, 1904, 1905, he travels to a city called Kazan, K-A-Z-A-N. This is a much bigger area, and it is here in this city that he gains reputation as a star, similar to the guy he met in that monastery a little while back.

He becomes known as a faith healer, and people in the town of Kazan are saying, this guy has really deep insights. He can help people who are struggling through spiritual crises, and we think he's cool.

Well, sure, yeah.

I mean, he definitely knew how to command a room. He also had to have learned at least a little more diplomacy because despite the continuing rumors that he was sleeping with women who followed him around, rumors that, by the way, will continue to follow him around for the rest of his life, Rasputin did manage to make a pretty good impression on the local religious leaders at the end of the day, two of whom wrote a letter of recommendation and arranged for him to travel to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St. Petersburg in which contained one of the best theological seminaries in Russia.

Also nailing the pronunciation there, man.

That was great.

I couldn't have done that one.

It's fun for me.

This is a huge deal, right? Because the days of secret root cellar chapels are over, my babushkas, the religious leaders at this monastery. They have a ton of political pull. One of them is a guy named Archmandrite Theophan Beistrov. Archimandrite, excuse me, it's kind of like a supervising abbot.

Yeah.

And this Beistrov character was quite connected. He was plugged in to the upper crust of St. Petersburg society. A young man himself, very much on his way up in the church, he regularly spent time with the super wealthy in their posh homes and these salons, you know, all of the most important people went to him for spiritual advice.

Yeah, yeah. Eventually, this guy, Theophon, even serves as the confessor for the Russian imperial family. So this is a good guy to know, Greg is thinking, and Greg tries to impress him, and it works. Theophon is like, Rasputin, you're awesome, dude. How long are you in St. Petersburg? You should stay at my house. And, Noel, if we allow ourselves a bit of cynicism here, is it fair to— Just for a treat? Yeah, just as a treat. Is it fair for us to suppose that Rasputin was manipulating Theophan to climb the social ladder?

Well, Ben, I'm very stuck in this You Can See Everything documentary that I just saw that I think you're going to go see soon. um, about Elizabeth Holmes and sort of like Nathan Fielder, the nature of like, who's telling the truth when and.

Why, and was it all an act? Like what even is manipulation? You know, isn't he just trying his best to do a good job to get, no, no, I don't know.

I'm making the Futurama gift face. I squinted my eyes at you.

I mean, yeah, I think, I think that's fair to say, but also like he is, good at what he does he is making an impression yeah and i guess he definitely has um.

Ambitions let's call.

It there we go yeah and we we are not in the room where it happens here so we have no idea of greg's internal motivations but we can say he did leverage his charm and persuasiveness to talk Theophan into bringing him along to those top-rate salons in the town, and this is where he meets the local aristocracy. They hang out as one-percenters in St. Petersburg, and they talk about religion and the occult and the supernatural. And once Rasputin gains entry into that social sphere, he increasingly attempts to alienate Theophan and charm the people he thinks are more important, and he has a great deal of success.

He's stabbing his boy Theophon in the back? Who got him there? He got him in those rooms?

Scorpions, man.

Now he's turning on him?

Yeah, this is a bit of context we have to establish. Way before Greg blows through town, the rulers of St. Petersburg are super-duper into stuff like spiritualism and theosophy.

They were.

fascinated by the idea of anything occult or supernatural they were also really bored of their day-to-day lives because similar to the lives of a siberian peasant at the time if you're an aristocrat in st petersburg your entire life could feel mapped out from cradle to grave.

Dude the the malaise of the super super rich yeah it's it's it's real and it also is largely what leads to like You know, you hear about a lot of super, super rich folks developing some very interesting, you know, hobbies and proclivities, let's just say. In this case, yeah, these salons, it's like it's almost like considered an intellectual pursuit to be just a little, a little mildly blasphemous as a treat.

You know what I mean?

So to these folks, and I love the way you put it there, Noel, to these folks this Greg guy from out of town, from way out in Siberia, he is a huge breath of fresh air. He's got wild ideas. He's so weird. That beard! He's got that rockin' beard. He's also a native Russian just like us, so he's cooler than those French folks we've been following. We might just have a mystic here at home.

God, I'm trying to wonder if Rasputin was the mystic that we have at home. Like, what's the one that's like the top notch one out there in the world?

Unclear. We'll get to it.

So he really is starting to get in with these folks who can help him in his ambition, you know, to continue to rise in the ranks. of influence, you know, in Russian society. If that is in fact what he was seeking, you know, if he was like really had a laser focus on getting all the way to the top, to the top guy.

Right, yeah.

His first trip is only a few months and he goes back home. He returns to Pokrovskoe in autumn of 1903. And we don't really know how often he traveled back and forth, but we can say by 1905, St. Petersburg was becoming a lot like a second home. And by this point, Greg had used all his manipulative Machiavellian wiles to make the most important social connection of all. He's going to meet the royal family. All the way to the top, baby. All the way to the FBI. No, the royal family, indeed.

And this, y'all, is probably where the story starts to ring a bell. From that Animated film that I mentioned, Anastasia. That is what is dramatized in that cartoon. And boy, oh boy, did they make Rasputin sort of a Jafar type figure. I seem to recall he like shoots green magic stuff out of his pointy spindly clawed fingers.

I remember that. Yeah, yeah.

And he has like a bat that's like his sidekick. Yeah, that's his parrot basically. Exactly.

This was, by the way, not a Disney film. It was one of those kind of second-rate animation studios.

I remember it fondly.

We should do an episode about those non-Disney animation features.

Dude, the Bluth Company. Well, no, that is a Disney.

That is a Disney one. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, like Secret of NIMH, like the Bluth Company, which, by the way, that company made, like, they were the dark... antithesis to Disney. And then Disney sort of had to get dark almost in response. Ben, this is absolutely an episode topic. But for now, we're going to take a pause and we're going to come back with our next episode where we start to get into the plot of the animated feature Anastasia.

Yes. And folks, just a heads up. When you hear this second episode in the series on Thursday, we are going to have to have a disclaimer for some gnarly things. So that's a heads up before the heads up. That's a Greg turning into a Rasputin. That's a big, big thanks to our super producer, Mr. Max Williams. That's a huge thanks as well, Noel, to Jonathan Strickland, a.k.a. The Quister, for not showing up On this one, I feel like he has a Russian accent that he's really proud of, and it's probably insufferable.

He is kind of our Rasputin.

He is 100%. Are you kidding?

We should maybe start seeking counsel from him rather than.

You know, bullying him.

We should introduce him to our family members and let him roam around our houses at all times of night.

Yeah.

Well, Ben, huge thanks to you for doing the research on this thing that's like, gosh, we're going to have to figure out how to kill some of your darlings here because this could be a three-parter, but we promised ourselves we would make it only a two-parter. But I'm super excited to jump into part two with you very soon.

Big, big thanks, of course, to Christopher Haciotis, Yves Jeffcoat, Here in Spirit, Dr. Rachel Big Spinach Lance, A.J. Bahamas Jacobs, The Puzzler, who recently talked with one of our favorite comics and comedian writers, David Wayne, and of course, the folks at Ridiculous Crime. Most importantly, nine years into the game.

Thank you, Noel.

Oh, and to you as well, sir. We'll see you next time, folks.

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The Rasputin Episode, Part One: A Young Mystic On The Rise

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