Happy Rasputin Day!
Of course, it wasn’t such a great day for him
The group led him down to the cellar, where they served him cakes and red wine laced with a massive amount of cyanide. According to legend, Rasputin was unaffected, although Vasily Maklakov had supplied enough poison to kill five men.
…Determined to finish the job, Prince Yusupov became anxious about the possibility that Rasputin might live until the morning, leaving the conspirators no time to conceal his body. Yusupov ran upstairs to consult the others and then came back down to shoot Rasputin through the back with a revolver. Rasputin fell, and the company left the palace for a while. Yusupov, who had left without a coat, decided to return to get one, and while at the palace, he went to check on the body. Suddenly, Rasputin opened his eyes and lunged at Yusupov. He grabbed Yusupov and attempted to strangle him. At that moment, however, the other conspirators arrived and fired at Rasputin. After being hit three times in the back, he fell once more. As they neared his body, the party found that, remarkably, he was still alive, struggling to get up. They clubbed him into submission. Some accounts say that his killers also severed his penis (subsequently resulting in urban legends and claims that certain third parties were in possession of the organ).[23][24][25] After binding his body and wrapping him in a carpet, they threw him into the icy Neva River. He broke out of his bonds and the carpet wrapping him, but drowned in the river.
Three days later, Rasputin’s body, poisoned, shot four times, badly beaten, and drowned, was recovered from the river. An autopsy established that the cause of death was drowning. It was found that he had indeed been poisoned, and that the poison alone should have been enough to kill him. There is a report that after his body was recovered, water was found in the lungs, supporting the idea that he was still alive before submersion into the partially frozen river.
Even if that’s not quite how things happened it sure makes an interesting tale.
Life, People | Mr. Bingley | 
December 29, 2011 11:20 am
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12 years ago someone tried to auction Raz’s penis on eBay. It wasn’t pretty, even when his family jewel was encased in a large jewel-encrusted box.
I believe that item prompted eBay’s policy against auctioning body parts.
*cleans coffee off of monitor*
He was one tough cookie…
Put a kilt on Rasputin, and he’s the spitting image of Mr. Bingley.
I kid you not: Once, I went to an investor’s preview of a musical about Rasputin. The songs were really weird, but somehow we weren’t treated to a musical number about his death–I imagine it would’ve been a spectacular finale!