Foreign News: Rasputin & the Record

A London courtroom. On the bench, pale and dignified in a black gown and white wig, last week sat 82-year-old Justice Sir Horace Avory. Before him, also gowned and wigged, were two of the greatest trial barristers in all Britain—Sir Patrick Hastings for the prosecution, Sir William Jowitt for the defense. Handsome, hollow-eyed Princess Irina Alexandrovna Youssoupov was suing Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures, Ltd. for damages. She charged that she had been libeled and her character defamed by a rape episode in MGM's cinema Rasputin, the Mad Monk. The courtroom was jampacked by a curious crowd which knew that for the first time the true story of how Rasputin met his death was to be told under oath.

So theatrical was his appearance, so unbelievable was his career that simple domestic folk are apt to think that Gregory Rasputin never really existed. He did. There are many people living who knew him well.

In 1904, after giving birth to four very handsome daughters, Russia's German-born Tsarina produced an heir to the throne. The boy, a haemophile, was in constant danger of bleeding to death. Honest doctors did all they could for him. Finally the distracted Empress turned to spiritualists, mediums and quacks. She was abetted in this by the Montenegran Princesses, Militza and Anastasia. superstitious daughters of the pot-bellied King Nicholas of Montenegro and sisters of Queen Elena of Italy. The Montenegran Princesses introduced into the palace a series of strange conjurers including the famed Philippe Nizier-Vachot, a onetime butcher's assistant from Lyons who claimed to be the reincarnation of the Prophet Elijah. Elijah fell from favor, died and his successors were swept out when the Princesses went to

Kiev and discovered a black-bearded peasant chopping wood in the monastery garden, who claimed that he could cure the Tsarevitch.

Gregory Rasputin was never really a monk. Born in Western Siberia, he was ordered banished to Eastern Siberia for persistent immorality, escaped before the sentence could be executed, worked as a bellboy in a bawdy house, later traveled from monastery to monastery doing odd jobs for the monks. He learned to read and quote the Bible and he developed an uncanny faculty for working on the sympathies of women. His beard, his matted hair and peasant blouse are familiar to the world, but those who knew him best remember most his pale, dark-circled eyes. Rasputin was definitely hypnotic.

His influence with the Tsar and Tsarina was due to the fact that he was able to keep the Tsarevitch amused, to quiet his tantrums and occasionally to stop his bleeding. He ran an elaborate spy service of his own through which he was able to keep the Little Father advised on court intrigues. He gave extraordinary breakfast parties at which his handsome hobble-skirted admirers were permitted to lick the fingers that Rasputin had just dunked in his fish soup. During the War he was strongly suspected of being a German agent.

On Dec. 16, 1916, Prince Felix Youssoupov, a delicate young man who had inherited a fortune estimated at $300,000,000, invited Rasputin to his palace after dinner to meet some women. Rasputin went. Three days later his body, badly battered about the head and bearing eleven bullet wounds, was found under the ice of the Neva.