Grigori Rasputin

did raputin really molest Felix Yusopov?

Rasputin is a controversial guy because he was slandered in the extreme, but there is growing sympathy for him these days.

Nicholas was a very good man. He was faithful to his wife, sold his land to the state to give to peasants, and spent his pay on all sorts of charity. A poor woman once woke him up in the middle of the night to beg he pardon her fiance, who had been arrested for revolutionary activity, and he did so right away.

I hear they have his dick in a jar in some museum someplace

When captured, he told his family to remember that only love conquers hate, and never to hate

He cured Alexei's haemophilia, through a combination of luck, an understanding of stress's effect on the body that was well ahead of his time and holy magic, but he was a fucking weirdo who may have been in a banned sex cult

Thats a moose dick actually, no one knows what happened to the original except that it was used as a fertility charm by some rich dude

Just what did he do that made the royal family think his treatments were helping the whole hemophilia thing?

Doctors said his condition was critical, and they sent for Rasputin, and didn't come (having never met them, and just sent back word that the child will recover soon, just pray. He recovered in a few hours. This sort of thing happened several times, and the boy himself ended up loving him

Learning this shit to understand the russian revolution is like learning about our times by reading the daily mail.

>I need a history lesson on Rasputin!
Cool guy, check out youtube documentaries about him. They really wanted this guy dead, they poisoned, show and drowned him, his dick was also presumed to be gigantic for some reason.

Obviously it depends on who you ask. Most people at the time assumed he was fucking the Tsarina and other aristocratic women. A part of his strange religious belief was that people must sin to be forgiven and seeking forgiveness made a good person and seemed to practice this just as an excuse to do whatever he wanted.
I think it's kind of a narrow view of history to look at the deaths of the Tsar and his family as a tragedy apart from what the Tsar's themselves had been inflicting on their own people for generations before. Nicholas' inability to give up even an iota of control or take a strong hand in eliminating the remnants of serfdom sealed his own fate. I think it's overshadowed by the atrocities commited by the Soviets, but people forget that the gulag system had roots in Tsarist Russia and that even this was considered lenient then since before exile to Siberia people were typically executed for very minor crimes. I don't see the execution of the Tsar as a tragedy above anyone else's, it's just more visible.

You need to be really good if you want to be eccentric, like Catherine the Great.
But when you are an ineffective ruler that plunges his country into a series of wars and economic crises, can't decide if you are a tough guy that shoots people or a lenient guy that allows dissent than your family's eccentricities become exploited by your enemies. He would have been deposed without Rasputin as well.

Absolutely, but it definitely didn't help things either. Rumors became way worse when the Tsar left for the front and left Rasputin behind with his family.
I think most historians see Nicholas as a bit of a moron at worst and stoic at best. He had this weird paradox about him where he seemed to want to be a father and husband more than a ruler and at the same time wouldn't allow for the establishment of parliaments with any real power beyond advisers to himself. I think he had the belief that Russia needed an absolute Tsar even though clearly in hindsight right-wing authoritarianism this lead to the pendulum swinging very far in the other direction.
Rasputin has been mythologized a lot, but to me he seems like another one of history's sociopaths with an amazing ability to manipulate people. I don't mean sociopath in the sense of impulsive violence like a serial killer, but someone so outside of societal norms at the time that he can't be considered a normal functionary of society. Someone clearly intelligent and aware of what he was doing.

Niki's problem wasn't the fact that he didn't liberalize Russia. It's a very ideologically centered point of view. Like a medieval historian explaining the downfall of some ruler by the fact that he was pagan didn't embrace Christianity on time. He just alienated all Russian segment of society:
1. Intelligentsia was buthert because of lack of liberalization as you mentioned, by they were loud but not a very powerful group. We view this as an important issue only because they are the once that wrote history
2. The monarchists, aristocrats and traditionalists were his last bastion and they were alienated by Rasputin sex stories for sure, but they weren't powerful enough to keep him in power anyway
The army officers, patriots and imperialists were very angry by his failures and humiliations of the wars in Japan and ww1. They were a very significant force.
The workers in the cities got hit hard by conscription and economic crisis and became very revolutionary, also a huge nail in his coffin
Peasants were also hit extremely hard by conscription and by being forced to walk into machine gun fire in their millions in a war they didn't understand as famine began to strike their families at home.
Add the fact that the idiot armed both the workers and the peasants and you get a revolution lead by the intelligencia and executed by the armed workers peasants with the imperialists, monarchist and officers standing largely aside looking without much compassion. The later 3 formed the white movement later on but not in order to save Niki.
He literally had no support left. His cruel death and photogenic looks was the only thing that made him a tragic figure for later generations. His contemporaries didn't give a lot of fuck about it.

Sorry for shitty editing of my post...