Unobscured · iHeartPodcasts and Grim & Mild

S4 – Interview 1: Douglas Smith

January 5, 2022·1 hr 58 min·10 clips

Award-winning historian Douglas Smith reveals how he spent six years uncovering the real Rasputin, buried under decades of lies.

The interview starts with myth as the problem. Aaron Menke introduces Douglas Smith as a historian trying to pull Rasputin out of rumor and stage smoke, while still taking the rumor seriously. Smith treats the man and the legend together, since Rasputin's reputation shaped the way people later pictured imperial Russia. The palace meeting gets less cozy the closer Smith looks. Rasputin arrives before Nicholas and Alexandra in the fall of 1905, with Russia already shaken by revolution. That timing matters. Alexei's health is not the starting point here. Smith puts the first weight on Rasputin's political advice: hold the throne, hold autocracy. Nicholas hears exactly the thing he wants to hear, and it lands harder because it comes from a Siberian peasant presented as a man of God, not from a minister or a general. Alexandra is pulled in as well. Smith describes the royal couple listening to Rasputin as if he opened a door onto peasant Russia, a world the court could barely reach. Rasputin gets something out of it too. The palace becomes proof, at least to him, that his authority is real. Smith keeps ambition in the picture. Rasputin is not only a holy man or a dirty joke in imperial costume. He is someone testing what access can do. Near the end, the discussion moves to intellectuals after 1906 and 1907, when political pressure sits beside a turn away from materialism and toward religion and idealism. Rasputin fits awkwardly, and usefully, into that search for meaning.

As heard by us

A sharp Rasputin interview that keeps the myth in view while putting the politics first.

Rasputin arrives here as a political presence as much as a legend, with Douglas Smith tracing how a Siberian mystic became meaningful to Nicholas and Alexandra at a moment when Russia was near rupture. The key is timing.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Rasputin the political advisor came before Rasputin the faith healer -- and that reframes everything.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Unobscured