The Rasputin File - Edvard Radzinsky, 2000 - Random House.

Commentary:

This latest account of the life and times of the influential peasant Rasputin benefits not only from the mass of documents that are now accessible for study in Russia itself but also from the discovery of a known but long missing key file, in Paris.

The documents that comprise this file are the records of interrogations about the peasant right after the abdication of the Tsar in March 1917, when the Provisional Government opened an inquiry into potential wrong doings by those at the top, including the empress herself (she was thought to be a German agent...) In October 1917, the Bolsheviks took power...the investigation ended, and the file went missing.

Curiously, it was through the agency of the cellist/conductor Mstislav "Slava" Rostropovich that Radzinsky finally acquired this file in1995, the core of his book.

A gripping page turner...In the end, I found it interesting that illiterate, charismatic and feral Rasputin, far from being "evil" - which I never believed - was one of the few to understand what needed to be done to stem the unrest sweeping the country in 1916 and put Russia back on its feet... Steps immediately taken by the Bolsheviks on attaining power, including the "separate peace" of Rasputin's pleas...

And he was murdered by aristocratic playboys, as much for his misunderstood position of trust in the palace as for the insolence of it all.

Rasputin, btw, is his family name. And "dissolute" he became only in the last two years of his life...but no more so than many. Radzinsky here is careful to separate fact from contemporary defamatory propaganda.

I should add that Rasputin is enjoying a revival of interest in Russia, a second look. Where this will lead, nobody knows...