About this episode

Comedian Daniel McKeon explores the chaotic life and death of Grigori Rasputin in St. Petersburg during December 1916.

St. Petersburg, December 1916. Grigori Rasputin has the ear of the Tsarina, the loathing of half the aristocracy, and roughly a fortnight left to live. Comedian Daniel McKeon drops into the middle of it under the gamertag PoisonNecker56, to find out what a circle of well-born gentlemen intend to do about the Holy Devil. Daniel's qualifications for imperial espionage: a half-remembered GCSE module, a genuine tolerance for vodka, an unbothered relationship with the cold, and a stated willingness to sell absolutely anyone out. Somewhere upstairs on the same street, the man everyone is whispering about is still very much alive. Rasputin was a Siberian peasant mystic who became the most hated man in Russia largely because he was the only person who could calm the haemophiliac Tsarevich. The court he attached himself to was already a slow-motion disaster: 1,300 people crushed to death at Nicholas II's 1896 coronation festival scrambling for free commemorative mugs, a wartime prohibition on vodka that wiped out roughly a third of state revenue overnight, and fifty jewelled Fabergé eggs going out at Easter while the bread queues lengthened. The legend has Rasputin eating enough cyanide…

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