“During what became know as Russia’s Silver Age, from roughly 1890 to 1914, a period that overlaps almost exactly with the rise and fall of Rasputin, the country’s educated classes exhibited a fascination for mysticism and the occult in all manner of the supernatural.”

Of all the charlatans of the time, it is Rasputin we will never forget, for “it cannot be stressed enough that the image of Rasputin that developed in the years before the Great War, an image which remains to this day, was created less by Rasputin the man—by the true nature of his character and the actual record of his actions—than by Russia’s diseased zeitgeist of the early 1900s.” Unceasing political turmoil, rapid modernization, and defeat on the battlefield had caused his nation to lose its collective mind.

Every troubled age needs a scapegoat.

—from “Rasputin: Faith, Power, and The Twilight of The Romanovs” by Douglas Smith