Antony BeevorRasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs

SIR ANTONY BEEVOR is a British historian of war and former British Army officer. He commanded a troop of tanks in Germany during the Cold War. He has published more than fifteen popular historical works, mainly on the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War, and most recently the Russian Revolution and the Russian Civil War. His book Stalingrad (Viking Press, 1998) was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Wolfson History Prize and the Hawthornden Prize. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In Rasputin and the Downfall of the Romanovs (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2026), he wonders how a barely literate peasant from Siberia could determine the fate of the world. Undoubtedly, the so-called “mad monk” bewitched Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra. More than a century later, we still fail to comprehend fully the collapse of the greatest autocracy on Earth. Was there any truth to the wild tales that brought down the empire? Or was his true legacy an unsettling lesson on the potency of myth?