Most owners would prefer a counsel of advisors, to having a Rasputin whispering in their ear.
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Rasputin's early life in a small Siberian village is skipped over with indecent haste.
Rasputin's political power emanated from a supposed ability to staunch the tsarevich's bleeding and lessen his pain.
Meanwhile, the French film starring Depardieu as Rasputin still has not been released in his new Russian homeland.
Mr Radzinsky makes it clear that Rasputin, rather than directing Alexandra, primarily told her what she wanted to hear.
This piece of self-advertisement aside, one of Rasputin's saving graces was that he also knew when to favour discretion.
As Mr Moynahan nicely puts it, Rasputin did not so much govern Russia as help to make it ungovernable.
So it's Boney M and "Ra, Ra Rasputin" at the next rally then.
Here, with a true historian's fervour for accuracy, a large group of individuals photographed in Rasputin's salon are all identified.
But Mr Moynahan uses Russian archive materials to chronicle Rasputin's life in exhausting detail, leaving few of its peculiarities unexplained.
Having smashed up a smart Moscow night-club, Rasputin was challenged to prove that he was who he said he was.
This book draws a vivid picture of the decadent, superstitious and gossipy climate of pre-revolutionary Russia, with Rasputin at its centre.
History has remembered Rasputin as an almost supernatural fiend, but he was in reality one of the century's great political fixers.
In 2011, he played the lead role in the film Rasputin, a Franco-Russian production about the life of eccentric monk Grigory Rasputin.
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In a single year under Rasputin's influence Russia had five interior ministers, three war ministers, four agriculture ministers and three justice ministers.
Four years ago, Bill Clinton's inaugural parade, complete with unicyclists, Eskimo dancers and mules from Arkansas's Rasputin Mule Farm, lasted over three hours.
However, as the political situation deteriorated and Tsar Nicholas's energies were diverted to running the disastrous Russian war effort, Rasputin's influence over Alexandra strengthened.
Rasputin's placemen, once in office, were obliged to grant him the lesser favours in which he trafficked wholesale preferments, contracts, judgments, subsidies, pardons and the like.
His first career was as a mathematician, his second as a car salesman, his third as a political kingmaker, nicknamed Rasputin, under Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin.
Rasputin could fix church jobs, too: a word from him was enough to have a troublesome bishop dispatched to Siberia, or a tractable one promoted to Metropolitan.
Nor did he forget his father, or Hansi Knoteck, both of whom once again were models-in-absentia, as was Grigori Rasputin, who he cast as a bearded king.
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Although it is called Anastasia, the film addles dates, kills off the ghoulish Rasputin by drowning (rather than poison) and advances the plot through a fairytale love story.
Lately he has spent considerable time in Russia, including for the filming of the French-Russian film "Rasputin, " and has been seen in television ads for ketchup and kitchen furniture.
From Rasputin's point of view, the more unprincipled and incompetent the men who ran Russia, the better: they were less likely to argue back, or to have ideas of their own.
But one thing that can be said with certainty about Rasputin is that people will continue to be fascinated by his contradictory blend of mystical holiness, sexual depravity and political potency.
He pointed out the figures based on Rasputin and Hansi Knoteck, and Die Welt printed photos of murals next to their purported sources, including the Coptic saint in the Kaiser Friedrich.
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Rasputin's enemies eventually managed to do away with him.
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Born in 1869, a year after the tsar, Rasputin seemed destined to a perfectly ordinary peasant life when an enforced stay in a local monastery, named Verkhoturye, seems to have changed him forever.
The file contained a detailed series of interviews conducted shortly after the Russian Revolution with many of the protagonists in Rasputin's circle, but the resulting book is not a definitive biography of the man.
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