In her new book, Delin Colón used the French memoirs of her great-great uncle to put forth an interesting argument for another reason why Grigory Rasputin might have been killed – his acceptance of Russia’s Jews.
Rasputin’s death is already the stuff of legend. It’s been said that he was tricked into ingesting enough poison to kill five men but remained unaffected. When that didn’t work, his murderers shot him four times, beat him, bound his body, wrapped him in a carpet and threw him into an icy river. He apparently broke free from the bindings and the carpet but drowned in the partially frozen waters.
By the time of his murder, Russia was in the throes of World War I and, with Tsar Nicholas II away at the front, Rasputin began exercising more and more influence over Tsaritsa Alexandra. As a longtime member of the royal court, he held considerable sway over her decisions and he even convinced her to fill several government posts with his handpicked candidates.
Meanwhile, many Russians blamed Rasputin and his influence on the royals for the country’s deteriorating economy. It also didn’t help that the war was not going well.
Now, in a slim 112-page book, Colón has put forth the notion that Rasputin’s advocacy on behalf of the country’s Jews contributed to his demise. The author says she’s spent a dozen years gathering the facts and first learned about Rasputin’s philo-Semitism by reading the memoirs of her great-great uncle, Aron Simanovitch, Rasputin’s Jewish secretary.
Here’s more:
This book is an account of Rasputin as a healer, equal rights activist and man of God, and why he was so vilified by the aristocracy that their libelous and slanderous rumors became accepted as history. For nearly a century, Grigory Rasputin, spiritual advisor to Russia’s last Tsar and Tsarina, has been unjustly maligned simply because history is written by the politically powerful and not by the common man. A wealth of evidence shows that Rasputin was discredited by a fanatically anti-Semitic Russian society, for advocating equal rights for the severely oppressed Jewish population, as well as for promoting peace in a pro-war era. Testimony by his friends and enemies, from all social strata, provides a picture of a spiritual man who hated bigotry, inequity and violence.
Sound interesting? Sure. I think this could open up even more argument over Rasputin’s life and, of course, his legendary death.
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