The Fall of the Dynasties: The Collapse of the Old Order: 1905-1922

by Edmond Taylor

To the politically sophisticated eye of the 1960s there is something vaguely unsatisfactory about the surviving photographs of Gregory Efimovich Rasputin. They usually depict a sturdy man of medium height wearing a peasant blouse or caftan, baggy trousers and heavy boots. He has a coarse, fleshy nose, long, brown, not-very-well-combed hair, parted in the middle, and a wiry, unkempt beard, so dark as to be almost black. He is staring hypnotically into the camera, with enormous, deep-set Ancient Mariner eyes. (Contemporary memoirs describe them as being of a piercing steely blue, with pupils that contracted to pinpoints when their owner was concentrating.) The general impression is of a genuine rascal who is inexplicably going out of his way to look like one.

Stolypins rival