Late Night Live — Full program podcast · ABC Australia

Acclaimed historian and author Antony Beevor on Rasputin, and Elon Musk's facilitation of making fake porn with unauthorised images

·55 min·3 clips

The Rasputin assassination plan falls apart with poison, a gramophone loop, and the song 'Yankee Doodle Dandy.'

1. Late Night Live pairs Antony Beevor's Rasputin history with Jo Bartosz's critique of AI-generated porn on X. 2. David Marr hosts the program from Gadigal Land in Sydney, and Beevor joins to discuss Rasputin and the Romanovs while Bartosz joins to discuss Pornocracy and online sexual imagery. 3. The episode asks how one man shaped Romanov politics and how X and Grok make fake porn from ordinary images. 4. Beevor starts with Alexei's haemophilia, six weeks after birth, and the doctors' warning to Tsar Nicholas II and Alexandra. 5. He says Rasputin was a semi-literate holy man from Siberia whose presence entered the imperial family through Alexandra's belief in divine help for her son. 6. Beevor argues that Rasputin's influence was unprecedented because a peasant from Siberia exercised power inside the greatest autocracy in the world. 7. He describes St Petersburg society as obsessed with shamans and spiritualists, and says Rasputin's gaze and deep voice had a strong effect on women and children. 8. The conversation notes that some women clipped his fingernails, kept the clippings in their dresses, and even sewed in bits of half-chewed food as talismans. 9. Beevor says Rasputin addressed women and servants with the familiar form of speech, which men saw as a threat to social order. 10. He also says Rasputin was both spiritual and lascivious, using the banya and the idea of sin and repentance as part of his seduction technique. 11. Beevor presents Nicholas II as shy, obstinate, and insecure about his height, including a remark that he was a "dwarf" compared with grand duke Nicholas. 12. He says Nicholas and Alexandra were obsessively in love, but that their private world cut them off from the outside world and from St Petersburg society. 13. Alexandra is described as more English than German because she was brought up at Windsor and Balmoral after her mother's death. 14. Beevor says Rasputin's long-distance advice during Alexei's illness convinced Alexandra that he was a saint acting through God. 15. He adds that Rasputin warned the empress to stay out of war after Sarajevo, and that he opposed involvement in the Balkan Wars and the First World War. 16. The interview explains that Rasputin and Alexandra preferred ministers who supported them, producing "ministerial leapfrog" and repeated failures in government. 17. Beevor's account of the murder shows Prince Yusupov, arsenic in sugary cakes, a repeated "Yankee Doodle Dandy" record, and a botched attempt to dispose of the body. 18. He says the revolution followed soon after, and that rumours about Rasputin, Alexandra, and the tsar helped destroy confidence in the dynasty. 19. Bartosz's section is brisk and confrontational, with David Marr challenging her claims about pornography while she answers with surveys, age-verification rules, and examples from the UK and X. 20. Listeners interested in Romanov history, media regulation, or AI porn will get the most from this episode, while anyone avoiding history interviews or sexual-content policy may skip it.

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