Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs
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First published in 2026, Antony Beevor’s Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs revisits one of the most extraordinary figures in modern Russian history: Grigory Rasputin, the Siberian peasant and self-proclaimed holy man who came to exert a remarkable influence over Russia’s last imperial family. At the heart of the story are Tsar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra and their haemophiliac son Alexei, whose apparent improvement under Rasputin’s care helped secure his place within the royal household. As war engulfed Europe and confidence in the monarchy ebbed away, Rasputin became both a controversial confidant and a symbol of the court’s perceived corruption, his reputation shaped as much by rumour and scandal as by his actual influence.
Drawing on eyewitness accounts, diaries and archival material, Beevor examines the uneasy relationship between private belief and public power, and the ways in which myth, conspiracy and political misjudgement can hasten the collapse of a regime. Rather than treating Rasputin as a solitary villain responsible for the end of the Romanov dynasty, he places the mystic within the wider crisis of imperial Russia, where military disaster and a loss of public trust left an already fragile autocracy exposed. Following his acclaimed histories of war and revolution, Beevor brings his characteristic narrative clarity to a story in which historical tragedy sits alongside the grotesque and the darkly comic.
From the book
“The story serves to focus on that no-man’s land between truth and myth … which is an essential part of the story of Rasputin, and increasingly, of our own today.”
— Antony Beevor, Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs
On Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs
“An informative page-turner on the mystic who captivated the last czar’s family.”
— Kirkus Reviews